it's keyboard time again or keyboard and mouse time again this is the kidtronic
color keys by keytronic from 1995. a very colorful 101 key enhanced pc keyboard with
a matching two button clikmate mouse i'm actually the original owner of this keyboard and mouse set
i got it as a gift back when i was a kid in the '90s
i can't find much information about this except for one new york times article
from april 1995 which bemoans the lack of computer equipment in anything other than shades of beige
gray and white and it briefly mentions some of the more colorful computer accessories and components
that were available back then including a logitech mouse that was available in a woodgrain finish
and this keytronic kidtronic keyboard and mouse set but i can't find anything else
about it except for one ebay listing of somebody who's asking 300 dollars for it
it originally came with a matching mouse pad which i no longer have so i just substituted
something that matches the overall color scheme and it also came with a colorful cardboard frame
to put around your computer monitor it was only designed to fit 14 or 15 inch crt monitors and
since i thought it was even more gaudy than the keyboard and mouse i got rid of it a long time ago
but otherwise that was it surprisingly this did not come with any games or educational software
the only software you get was a mouse driver disk which you probably didn't need anyway
this version came with the large 5-pin din keyboard connector and a serial mouse i don't
know if they had a ps/2 version of this or not i suppose they would but again i can't find any
information about it all i can say is that i don't remember this coming of ps/2 adapters but
since these were the connectors my computer used at the time i did not need any adapters anyway
you may have noticed some discoloration especially around here and here that's not dirt i just
cleaned this thing pretty thoroughly it seems like the plastic is discoloring with age even
though you wouldn't think colored plastic would do that it's especially noticeable on this edge
although i don't know how well it's coming across on the camera but the blue plastic is almost kind
of turning greenish along here although you can see under the shadow here is the original blue
color so this part and this part is discolored but that little strip there is the original vibrant
blue color that this would have been when it was new and it seems like the mouse is not
actually discolored compared to the keyboard so maybe you can tell the difference there
and i don't think retrobright would work on this i don't know if it's ever been
tested on colored plastics and i'm not willing to be the guinea pig on an item
that's potentially worth 300 dollars at least according to that one ebay seller
here's the information sticker on the bottom of the keyboard the model number is e03601elkid
so as part of keytronic's 3600 series of keyboards and surprisingly it says
made in usa another surprise for a keyboard from 1995 is that it is xt/at switchable
there's the bottom of the mouse it's the keytronic clikmate and it is a ball type mouse
if you're familiar with these keytronic keyboards it should be no surprise that it's just a standard
rubber dome keyboard although these keytronic keyboards are definitely better than average
in terms of their typing feel for a rubber dome keyboard although the quality of the printing
on the keys is definitely not the best you can see some of the more heavily used keys
like these arrow keys have started to rub off but you big enter key fans will be happy of
this keyboard you do get a small backspace key but that's never been a problem for me
it just encourages you to make less mistakes i believe this is the only keyboard i have
which actually spells out numbers lock instead of just shortening it to num lock
and here's one of the systems i used this keyboard and mouse with back in the '90s
i won't go into too much detail about it but i'll briefly pop open the cover
and show you what's inside the cpu ram and hard drive have been upgraded over the years
inside is a pc chips m919 motherboard this was called a vip motherboard because it has three
types of slots vesa local bus isa and pci this motherboard was infamous for having fake cache
chips it has two chips on it which say write back on it but the traces going to them
just go in circles they don't go to the rest of the board and pc chips
hacked the bios to make it look like it has external cache installed even when it didn't but
you can see this one has a genuine cache module installed giving it a real 256k external cache
the cpu is a cyrix 5x86 120 megahertz rated although this version is running
at 133 megahertz because some of these cyrix 5x86s
have an unofficially supported four times clock multiplier which i have enabled
i have 64 megabytes of ram installed a western digital caviar 1.6 gigabyte hard drive
a 3com etherlink III ethernet card isa sound blaster 16
and a vesa local bus western digital paradise video card
it has one of the noisiest 3½ inch floppy drives i've ever
used it's made by chin on a teac 1.2 megabyte 5¼ inch floppy drive and a 32x cd-rom drive
so let's turn it on
here we are in the much hated ami winbios and unfortunately it looks like the mouse
has lost its horizontal movement i'm moving it all around and it's only moving up and down
i can still click on things but i can't move it side to side
i know it's not a problem with the computer because if i plug in a different serial mouse
i get a full range of movement and everything works like it should so something's wrong with
that keytronic mouse it's only moving up and down it's not moving left and right
but at least i can do a typing test of the keyboard
it's a very quiet keyboard
the feel is rather mushy as you would expect for a rubber dome
keyboard but i've certainly used worse and for a keyboard aimed at kids it's not bad
there was one screw hiding under the label holding together the mouse
so with that removed i have it open and as i move the mouse around you can see
both of the optical sensor wheels are moving so mechanically it's working
fine so the problem is either with the infrared sensors or this circuitry or maybe this cable
but now that i think about it the fact that the vertical direction of the mouse and the buttons
are working fine proves that the cable is not the problem because this is not sending raw x/y
values to the computer it's sending serial data so if there was a break in the wire then nothing
would be getting through to the computer instead of just the vertical direction and the buttons
well i took out the board and i cleaned the infrared leds and sensors and now
it's working perfectly as i move it around both horizontal and vertical movement is now working
fine so i've never had a mouse before where it required taking it apart and cleaning these
sensors but i guess there's a first for everything
it now has perfect movement in all directions buttons work fine
right click left click everything works now i'm all set for playing a game of pyramid solitaire
and i lost because i need an ace and there is none in the deck so you can't win them all
so that's the kid tronic by keytronic colorkeys keyboard and clikmate mouse from around 1994
to 1995. if you want something similar to this without spending three hundred dollars for this
on ebay the company s-i-i-g or sig or however you say it has something very similar they called it
the fun touch keyboard it was basically the same color scheme except the numeric keypad is purple
and you could find a whole bunch of those on ebay it says more than 10 available so i don't
know how many they have but they have quite a few and they're asking a much more reasonable 34.99
each for those keyboards although it does not come with a matching mouse