Mechanical keyboards have come a long way since their invention. In this article, we want to take a look back at the long, winding journey from their creation all the way up to the optical and mechanical marvels that we use now to dominate on the daily.
This might come as a surprise, but the first mechanical keyboards were invented much earlier than the PC. That’s because the first mechanical keyboards were actually typewriters, and the QWERTY layout that is still present on today’s keyboards was invented over 150 years ago. Imagine trying to pull off a circle-strafe on a setup like this.
Nothing else in the typewriter and paper world really bears much similarity to modern mechanical keyboards, so for brevity’s sake, we’ll consider the first QWERTY typewriter as the ancestor of the modern gaming keyboard and skip forward a bit. In the 1940s and 1950s, people begin using keyboards to interface with computers by punching out holes in punch cards and then feeding those punched cards into a reader. Then in the 1970s, Altair and Imsai came out with personal computers that allowed customers to connect keyboards.
Computers were not widely adopted at the time, and keyboards were for an even more niche subset of those users. Because of that, literally every PC keyboard was a custom built, 1-of-1 drop. Some of these early keyboards didn’t even have frames or housing, they were just a set of mechanical key switches wired together and laid out onto a flat surface.
The next era of personal computers integrated the keyboard into the housing of the computer, a move that would cement the concept of the keyboard as the PC’s primary input device. Some notable examples of these “keyboard computers” are Commodore’s Vic-20, C-64, Amiga, the Apple II and IIe, the ZX Spectrum, the Timex Sinclair, the MSX, the Atari 400 and 800, and the TI 99/4 and 99/4A.
It is in this era that companies begin to experiment with cheaper membrane keyboard technology, with the Atari 400 being one of the most prominent early examples.
Membrane keyboards solved a lot of problems at the time. Manufacturing costs for these keyboard computers could go way down and they were also spillproof. Spill resistance is a fantastic way to prevent kids who were used to playing in the dirt outside from accidentally spilling milk onto their fancy personal computer and short-circuiting an entire month of their parents’ salary.
After that, the two styles of keyboards would become locked in an endless struggle for dominance. IBM’s beloved Model M with its buckling springs would go on to move an estimated 10 million units, but the cheap membrane keyboards that came with prebuilt PCs would overtake them. But, mass-market adoption of PCs also meant a surge in PC gaming, and as competitive gaming began heating up, players started noticing the advantages that mechanical keyboards had, like better key rollover, lower actuation forces, and faster response times. Enter the mechanical gaming keyboard.
There’s still a lot of debate about which was the first mechanical gaming keyboard, but CORSAIR claimed a world first in the space when we released the first mechanical gaming keyboard with Cherry MX RGB mechanical key switches back in 2014.
Even though we’re big innovators in the mechanical gaming keyboard world, we definitely think membrane keyboards fit into the gaming world. We make plenty of high-quality membrane gaming keyboards for people who prefer a spill-resistant, quieter setup.
That covers the basics of the never-ending battle between mechanical and membrane keyboards, but there are also switch variants on the mechanical keyboards to get into. Currently, there are three major types of switches: mechanical, optical, and magnetic. Mechanical switches refer to the standard style of operation where the method of actuating the key switch is a physical connection to close the switch and send the signal. There are several varieties of magnetic switches, and if you’d like to learn more about them, we’ve got you covered.
Although magnetic Hall Effect switches have only recently started appearing on gaming keyboards, they were used in PC keyboards back in 1968 on Micro Switch’s SW series of keyboards. The reason these magnetic switches are called Hall Effect switches is because of American physicist Edwin Hall, who discovered the effects magnetic fields have on electrical current in 1879. In an oversimplified nutshell, Hall Effect key switches search for the evidence of this effect, and once they find it, they send a signal that a key’s been pressed. Hall Effect magnetic switches have a speed advantage over mechanical switches in that they have no “debounce” time.
Debounce is the amount of time it takes a switch that has been actuated to become reset back to a non-actuated state. Unlike mechanical switches, there isn’t a physical connection that needs to be made to actuate the switch. Since Hall Effect switches don’t have a physical actuation point, you can set their actuation point to be a set amount of distance traveled. This allows you to re-actuate the key the moment it begins to travel upward again, instead of having to wait for it to “debounce”. This dynamic adjustment of the actuation point is the basis of CORSAIR Rapid Trigger technology. Additionally, because Hall Effect magnetic switches have fewer moving internal components, they typically last longer than mechanical switches.
Finally, we come to optical key switches. Optical switches have many of the same benefits of Hall Effect switches. Because they use a beam of light to determine actuation, they also remove debounce time, and they also get the benefit of added reliability.
Whichever keyboard and key switches you think are right for you, CORSAIR has a keyboard that will meet your needs. Membrane, mechanical, optical, and magnetic – we’ve got ‘em all, plus innovative features like FlashTap SOCD and Rapid Trigger to help you turn these cutting-edge technologies into actual noticeable gameplay benefits.
As for what comes next, who can say? Just know that whatever keyboard technology emerges next, the innovative engineers working in the CORSAIR labs will figure out how to bring it to you, so you can game like you mean it.
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