Down The Rabbit Hole We Go

This is why I have more keyboards than I can use at any one time

- Koh Wanzi

The keyboard is one-half of the way you interact with your PC. As someone who writes for a living, I spend hours upon hours pecking away at letters, trying to string a bunch of words together in a semi-coherent manner.

In other words, my keyboard is very important to me, and I’m pretty picky about how it feels. My first mechanical keyboard was a SteelSeries 6Gv2 with Cherry MX Black switches, and it was a huge step up from the mushy laptop and flimsy rubber-dome keyboards I had used before.

However, the thing with mechanical keyboards is that they aren’t even anything new. The best keyboards were made in the 1980s – for instance, the iconic IBM Model F – but manufacturers had started to push more aggressively for cost savings by the 1990s, which led to a deluge of cheap, membrane keyboards on the mass market.

Fast-forward to today, and mechanical keyboards are seeing a resurgence, most notably among gamers. The original Razer BlackWidow was one of the first mechanical keyboards marketed specifically at the gaming community, and the years since have seen countless competitors from other brands, including models with their own proprietary “gaming oriented” switches.