This is a really old-school keyboard I borrowed from my co-worker Edward, who has apparently been using them for a quite a while. They appear to be a custom made model, that has somewhat of an old layout. Control is where capslock is, Alt is where control is, there are no separate directional keys. Edward had also re-wired it such that Escape was next to ‘1’ in the upper left, tilde was at the upper right where backspace usually is, and backspace was in the upper left corner of the
ten-key digit pad block.
The switches were black-domed cherry switches, with a linear feel. There was no way to find out whether they are the same linear switches that are currently available from Cherry, or whether they are some older version. Either way, I found them to feel nice and reliable, but somewhat too stiff. It feels like I’m squeezing keys rather then pressing them. Because of the linear feel, it’s hard to tell when you have actually registered a keypress, unless you push it down all the way, at which it abruptly bottoms out. However, the key actually seems to register about half way down.. so if you get used to it, it is possible to type pretty quickly.
In the end, the stiffness, as well as the bizarre layout (backspace is just too far away) made me give up on this one.
Update: after playing with some newer “linear” feel MX switches, the ones in this keyboard seem to be pretty much exactly the same. I guess they’ve been selling the same switch for 20 years..