Happy 45th Birthday to the IBM PC and Model F/XT

There's something genuinely cosmic about the IBM PC's 45th birthday, even if it seems like the most un-cosmic object imaginable. We tend to think of technology as a pure expression of logic—clean, weightless, inevitable. But the Model F/XT keyboard tells a different story. It's a device made of buckling springs, metal plates, and fiberglass, engineered to register each keystroke with near-religious precision. In an era of silent glass screens and ghostly touch gestures, this hardware feels almost alien: a relic from a time when you didn't just type on a computer—you physically *wrestled* with it. What makes this anniversary so mind-bending is the way the PC of 1981 is both a historical artifact and a live ghost. The architecture of that machine—its open design, its standardized interfaces, its very conception of "personal" computing—became the DNA for nearly every computer that followed. It's like watching a single early mammal evolve into half the species on Earth. And yet, the Model F keyboard was almost an afterthought: a utilitarian tool. But it became the ancestor of today's mechanical keyboard obsession, a whole subculture devoted to recapturing that primal, spring-loaded feel. The deeper wonder here is that we never truly left the physical realm. Even our most ethereal activities—social media, cloud storage, artificial intelligence—depend on the absurdly concrete act of pressing buttons. Every "post" and "like" begins as a micro-collision of finger and plastic. The Model F/XT was one of the first mass-produced colliders for that interaction, smashing human intention into machine logic at 10 characters per second. So raise a glass (or a keycap) to this 45-year-old. Source: [Happy 45th Birthday to the IBM PC and Model F/XT](https://sharktastica.co.uk/articles/pc-fxt-45). The article reminds us that progress isn't always about shedding the old—sometimes it's about realizing the old was weirdly, wonderfully alive all along, still ticking beneath our fingertips.