Starting the project, I picked the supposedly easiest piece of hardware out ot the bunch: The Keyboard!

It was in a very sorry state, at least by the looks of it. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of it in that state but it was really dirty and crusty. I took it home to disassemble it and give it a good clean as well. I took a picture of the keyboard layout, disassembled everything, pulled the keycaps and washed every single one individually with a brush, some soda and windex. Afterwards I let everything dry and removed all the dust and dirt from the pcb, the keyswitches, vacuumed the case and so on. The pcb was, apart from the dirt in a very healthy state. no corosion or broken tracks. Even the lacquer was not crumbling on the traces. I remember C64s that looked like a plowed field in atumn.

Then it was puzzle time and at first I tried to put the keys back from memory but that didn’t take me very far. That was probably because the layout is a bit different from modern keyboards. Also notice the unmarked keys on the top. I wonder what they were used for. Maybe they are user programmable. According to the datasheet, at least the keyboard of the newer D100 Terminal has a ASCII code assigned to every key it seems.

Also one of the turqoise keycaps had a broken alignment shaft. Fortunately some CA-glue made quick work of it and now it works reliable.

Here are some shots of the stripped keyboard before and after cleaning:

A few things I noticed along the way:
The keyboard connector indicates to me, that it does not belong to the Dasher D100 terminal I got with the computer. According to some documents I found on the web, it should be an older model. This one features a 15 pin AMP connector, whereas the terminal just has a 9-Pin 2.54mm pitch single-in-ine dupont connector on it as depicted in the manual here: