Around two weeks ago as I'm writing this, I declared that I became aware of a 'New' Model M keyboard, and I reasoned that I didn't really need one1. But the more I looked around on Unicomp's website, the more I started to daydream, and that's always dangerous.
They have lots of variants of the Model M, sure, and it's a great keyboard2, but I already told myself that I was over it. I didn't need it, and so on. Even though these smaller keyboards were kind of a pain to type on if you needed to get at the function keys or the num pad or the nav block or you needed to type in a key combination more complicated than CTRL+C.
Then I saw it: the PC122. The PC122 is a keyboard designed for the IBM 5250 terminal emulator, and has, as you might expect, 122 keys instead of the 104 keys that are standard nowadays. It looks like your standard Model M keyboard with two immediately-obvious differences: there are 24 F-keys across the top instead of 12, and there is a block of 24 keys on the left side, some with odd names (like 'Print', 'Help', 'Record', and 'Play'). Less obvious are some other nonstandard locations for keys as well as a few that don't show up on most 'normal' keyboards, like a Left Tab.
And, sure, haven't had an occasion to use a 5250 terminal emulator in over a decade3, but that doesn't matter. Just look at that thing. It's big, it's imposing, it's got a lot all those keys!
The sheer number of keys on this thing is really what drew me to it. Sure using a 60% keyboard or something kind of distills down the keyboarding experience to just the few keys that you really need, but it also removes or repurposes a lot of keys that were once standard. Laptop keyboards are especially bad about this. I deal with a lot of Dell computers in my Real Job™, and it really bothers me that keys like the Pause key have disappeared completely and the F-keys at the top have been replaced by multimedia functions4.
Of course, there are some problems. The F13-F24 keys aren't true F13-F24 keys, they send Shift+F1 for F13, for example. The blue buttons send combinations like CTRL+HOME instead of unique scancodes, and the odd placement of things like the Scroll Lock key means that I have to hunt around a little more for it. There's also an unlabeled key that turns out is a < symbol (shift + the blank key results in a >), which seems unusual (there are probably reasons for that that I don't yet understand because I've done almost no research)
Even with its weird layout and enormous footprint, I still find this thing charming. I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to use all these buttons for, so that's a nice project for later.