Exploring Different Keyboard Sensing Technologies

I don't know how their switches worked, but the Wang 2200 terminals¹ that my father worked with had an interesting angle on tactile feedback; on each keypress a single chunky solenoid attached to it physically moved to give a satisfying "chunk" noise and vibration.

The idea presumably was to give solid mechanical feedback to professional typists used to the same from electromechanical typewriters throwing the type arm onto the platten.

Note this was late 70s/early 80s so I may be confusing/conflating it with other machines.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_2200#/media/File%3AWang22...

I want a keyboard switch with a weight on the end of a lever, typewriter or piano style. Or some other mechanism whereby the resistance would be constant or even reverse-linear-ish (from gravity and momentum), not linear (from a spring). But as far as I know no such thing exists. :(

Is the mechanical keyboard craze still going on?

At some point everyone was talking about / showing off their mech keyboard in developer scene. I don’t think I’ve seen much in recent years.

I myself went deep into that for a while. Got a couple of keyboards and now I have two Apple Magic Keyboards. Don’t even know where I stashed my mechanicals.