They cost more, but they are far more rugged than a run-of-the-mill model. Mechanical keyboards are once again viable, even popular, alternatives to the bundled cheapie. Luckily, the keyboard-quality pendulum has swung back in the other direction over the last decade. Typing, that most basic of computing activities, became something you and your fingers had to endure, not enjoy, on subpar gear. Sadly, with the explosion of the home PC market in the 1990s and into the early 2000s, sturdy mechanical boards fell out of favor, as manufacturers looked for cheap, mass-market ways of getting tens of millions of people on their machines and online. Even throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, mechanical keyboards were as common a part of computer setups as floppy disk drives-because the people who were creating and using them knew what typing could, and should, be. That's the appeal of today's mechanical computer keyboards: They feel like products built for the ages, in these days of disposable tech. (Indeed, some of them are still in service.)

They used keys that clicked and rattled, and many of them felt like they would last forever. But as the hardy, ribbon-based machines gave way to computers, a different kind of mechanical keyboard came to the fore: the battlewagon keyboards of the early days of computing. Typewriters were, in a sense, the original mechanical keyboard, and generations of 20th-century office workers and aspiring novelists honed their typing chops on them. If you're a computer user of, shall we say, 'a certain age,' you remember a time when a room-filling cacophony of clicking was synonymous with typing as words appeared.uh, on a sheet of paper.

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