The good news is that if you have a beloved old Northgate that is showing its age, Northgate Keyboard Repair is still in the business of cleaning and repairing Northgate keyboards.įinally, if you’re looking to purchase a keyboard with buckling spring key switches, you might check out the Customizer line of keyboards at. I now own 5 - one for work, one for my home Vista machine, one for my home Linux machine, and two backups.Īs I type this, it is almost midnight on March 11, 2011, and Bob has only 3 Evolution keyboards left. So I followed my Mom’s tongue in cheek advice (“Get ’em before the hoarders do.”) and got more. I immediately ordered one, tried it out, and loved it. But a few - new in the box - still existed, and he had a few for sale. Evolutions were very advanced for their time, and very few were made. It was called the Omnikey Evolution keyboard. Well, I nearly fell off my chair when Bob told me that such a thing actually existed. One day, in an email to Bob, I mentioned that although I loved my Ultras (one of which Bob was cleaning and repairing at the time), what I really wished for was an ergonomic V-shaped version of the Ultra. What I really wanted, of course, was an ergonomic version of the Omnikey Ultra. In a sense, the keyboard is bent so your wrists don’t have to be.

The result is a keyboard that is shaped like a V rather than like a straight unbroken line. The major feature of an ergonomic keyboard is a split design in which the left and right halves of the keyboard are split apart, separated by a few inches, and angled slightly so that you can type without bending your wrists. A bout of online research convinced me that we really need more ergonomic keyboards, so I went shopping for one. Carpal tunnel syndrome forced a friend of mine to retire on disability and put The Fear into me. I switched from using a mouse to a using a trackball (I prefer a Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman), and that helped a lot. He also, in a manner of speaking, saved my wrists.Īfter 25 years of coding, the joints in my hands and wrists were starting to protest. Bob belongs to the school of minimalist website design, but his keyboard expertise and repair skills are totally maximal, and he really saved my bacon keyboards. That was when, thanks to the twin miracles of the Web and Google, I found Bob Tibbetts and his Northgate Keyboard Repair web site. I used only Northgate Omnikey Ultras for years, lugging them from job to job like an itinerant medieval carpenter carrying his tools with him from town to town, and using special keyboard plug adapters when keyboard plug design evolved first to PS/2 and then to USB.īut tools get worn and dirty and a few years ago my Ultras were terminally filthy and starting to fail.

Northgate omnikey 101