In the pre-computer era, my father took a remote sales job that had him working out of the house in rural Connecticut. His company shipped him a large, elaborate machine which was an early version of an answering machine but the writing machine he bought was an refurbished Royal No. 10 .
Elegant in design, I marvelled at how it worked and the noise it made as the keys “thwacked” at the paper, impressing each letter into the page with the finality of the written word. The Royal produced correspondence.
Now on Kickstarter you can back a device that harkens back to the look and feel of those old manual typewriters. The Penna bluetooth keyboard is a thing of beauty.
A slot up top holds your tablet (iPad or Android) and low-power Bluetooth 4.2 allows the keyboard to operate off of two AA batteries and hold a charge up to six months on stand-by.
Check out the Kickstarter page for details. They’ve clearly spent a lot of time on getting the right look and feel. Chrome keycaps on the outside and high-quality Cherry keyswitches on the inside are all chosen for the best quality. The carriage return arm has been repurposed to record and play back custom macros.
People used to buy fountain pens, now they buy custom keyboards.
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