As much as keyboard tech has moved on a lot in the last few years, there's still been a quiet corner of the industry dedicated to the old school. Dig a little down the rabbit hole and you'll find Unicomp, a manufacturer in Lexington, Kentucky dedicated to making modern recreations of the legendary IBM Model M 'buckling spring' keyboard using the same tooling (and many of the same employees) that produced the keyboard between 1985 and 1997.
Go a bit further though, and you'll come across Model F Labs, a firm that has been dedicated to bringing to life a modern version of IBM's original buckling spring keyboard, the IBM Model F, which preceded the Model M in the early 1980s. I remember floating around on keyboard forums back in the day and seeing the crowd-funded origins of the Model F project, and six years later I've finally got one of these modern Model F recreations in front of me - and boy is it fantastic.
I'll get into the reasons why this keyboard is so good in a moment, but it's worth exploring the technicalities of buckling spring keyboards, and why people like them so much. They operate quite differently to your more standard issue mechanical keyboard switch, relying on a spring literally buckling against a plastic paddle beneath it; that paddle in turn presses against a capacitive plate on the PCB, completing an electrical circuit and registering an input. That's putting it in as basic terms as I can, and I barely understand it!
source https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-model-f-labs-f77-ultra-compact-review-a-keyboard-from-a-by-gone-age
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