Brian Roemmele
Why were the early keyboards from the 1970s-1990s “boring beige? Early computer keyboards weren’t beige because folks lacked imagination. They were beige because a strict German workplace safety rule effectively outlawed pure black and pure white. In the late 1970s and 1980s, computers were still serious business machines—descendants of typewriters and adding machines that were expected to disappear into the office background. Germany, a major market and an early leader in workplace ergonomics, took that expectation and turned it into regulation. The Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) and related safety rules (notably around DIN 66234 and the 1980 ZH 1/618 guidelines for visual display terminals) set tight limits on how office equipment could look and reflect light. The core worry was eye strain. Office workers spent their days shifting focus between bright white paper and the machines in front of them under harsh fluorescent lights. A pure black keyboard created extreme contrast: every glance from paper to keys forced the pupils to dilate and contract like a camera aperture working overtime. Pure white equipment created the opposite problem—blinding glare that bounced straight into the eyes. The approved solution was a muted, low-contrast middle ground: beige or light gray with a matte finish. Reflectance had to stay in a narrow band neither too dark nor too bright so the eyes could rest. Because companies like IBM and Apple wanted to sell the same hardware worldwide, it was far cheaper to design one compliant beige keyboard than to tool up separate color versions for different markets. Europe’s rules effectively set the global palette. Beige also happened to be a manufacturing gift: the plastic was inexpensive to produce in off-white shades, and the color forgave dust, fingerprints, skin oils, and the inevitable scrapes of daily office life that would have looked catastrophic on black. That compromise held for nearly two decades. Then the late 1990s arrived. Computers stopped being purely office tools and became home appliances. The paperless office began to feel less theoretical. Manufacturers finally broke free of the old standards, unleashing the candy-colored translucent plastics of the original iMac G3 and, eventually, the silver and black machines that dominate today. Yet many RGB lit keyboards cause the very eye strain as the DIN rules tried to stop. So the next time you see an old putty-colored keyboard, remember: it wasn’t a failure of style. It was the visible result of German engineers trying to spare the eyes of a generation of office workers and the rest of the computing world simply followed along. This is by far the best keyboard ever over engineered and manufactured. The buckling spring IBM Model F (yes it beats the Model M).
