Keyboard Builders' Digest / Keyboard Spotting
Fujitsu Oasys
It seems Fujitsu made ALPS keyboards. An Oasys spotted by by May_1.
Published January 6, 2022
Creators! Feel free to tip me off about your keyboard related projects to bring them to 140K readers.
Announced as a Japanese language electronic typewriter, the OASYS was Fujitsu's first Japanese language word processor.
Fujitsu asked the public to help create the model name, and the name "OASYS (Office Automation SYStem) 100" was chosen from the submitted entries. All of Fujitsu's subsequent Japanese word processors were named "OASYS" (source).
The Oasys series had many models, some of them came with amazing keycap colors.
Specs of the Fujitsu Oasys keyboard (1983) in the picture above:
- SKCL Green ALPS
- two-tone alphas
- thumb-shift layout
A shared characteristic of these keyboards was the split spacebar, dubbed "thumb-shift" in this case:
Japanese kana characters were assigned to the same layout of keys as an alphabetic typewriter. Either of the two characters assigned to a single key could be selected by simultaneously pressing one of the Shift keys located near their thumbs when the character key was pressed. By arranging frequently-used characters in positions which were easy to press, the keyboard made Japanese-language input simpler, faster, and more accurate. Later, the thumb-shift specifications were passed on for use in the “NICOLA keyboard arrangement” of the Nihongo Input Consortium. (source)
Published on Thu 6th Jan 2022. Featured in KBD #60 (source).
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