This PC keyboard hides an interesting secret…

I found this keyboard on eBay recently, although it wasn’t quite the one I was looking for I still think it is interesting. Let me show you why.

The Keyboard

This is the keyboard, and you would be forgiven for thinking it is just a standard Windows keyboard with some accessibility stickers on it. But let’s look around it…

There are drives and ports! In fact this keyboard is a complete Pentium 4 based PC in a traditional 80s/90s home computer form factor!

It is a Cybernet Elite-4 computer, I’ve seen photos of these before but they are always black. This is the first beige one I’ve come across. Cybernet still exist today, manufacturing business and industrial computers. But I don’t think they make anything like this any more.

Opening Up

With that, let’s look inside, the PCI expansion cover needs to be removed so that 4 screws along the inside edge at the back can be removed. The machine will then open up from the back end to reveal…

Several things actually surprised me about this. First of all I was expecting to see a laptop motherboard with laptop parts, especially given the floppy and CD drive. But this is actually a full custom designed socket 478 motherboard, the hard drive is a desktop PC 3.5″ drive at 40GB, the IDE cable runs under the motherboard. I’m guessing the motherboard edge connector on the left is for a riser so a PCI card can be used, but there was no riser in the machine. It shouldn’t be hard to design one for it though.

Cleaning

I used my CompuCleaner to blow out the dust from inside the machine, removed the stickers from all the keys and gave the outside a quick clean. It will definitely need another pass later but it is already starting to look better.

I didn’t want to spend too much time cleaning it just in case it did not function correctly.

Powering On

The first bootup was just as expected for a regular PC, the RTC battery still seems to function which was a little surprising. This machine was manufactured in 2002 and I don’t think anyone has opened it since. It booted straight into Windows XP, which already had a user setup with no password. It had a third-party screen magnification application running on boot, so I think it is safe to assume given this and the keyboard stickers that the original owner may have had a visual impairment.

The built-in speakers are pretty much what you would expect from 2002, pretty much no bass to them, very much akin to average laptop speakers at the time. But this is not designed to be a gaming machine, this was very much designed for the office.

I used the System Properties screen to find out a little more about the machine.

In 2002 a 2.8GHz Northwood Pentium 4 would have been about as fast as you can get. It has 512MB RAM (32MB used for video) and 40GB hard drive, this likely would have been an expensive machine at the time.

The one glaring issue here, is that this machine’s hard drive has not been cleaned out. I bought it from a computer recycling company so I would have expected the hard drive to been erased. But a quick skim of the drive and I can find documents, emails and unfortunately even porn.

It looks like it was definitely used up until about 2010 and maybe a few times after that. I’m guessing at that point it went into storage and was eventually recycled.

What’s Next?

I haven’t fully decided what to do with this machine yet. It will be difficult to add a good graphics card to it to use it for retro gaming, but I’m sure it would be useful for some legacy applications. I have a local friend who needs older hardware to keep his PCB pick and place machine running, it could well make that easier.

The main reason I purchased it was that I thought it was interesting that companies were still invested in this form factor in the early 2000s. The machine I wanted to buy was a Schneider Euro PC (EDIT 2023-05-11: I now have one!), which looks amazing but is unfortunately quite expensive to purchase today. I will keep my eye out for one though.