Knowing the history of their hardware is more important to keyboard enthusiasts than the feel and sounds of the keys. It is hard to imagine a keyboard having a more interesting story than this one.
The Nuclear Keyboard was originally purchased on eBay along with a trackball accessory because of its fascinating layout that includes special function keys marked with ominous labels. When Pointless Tinkering bought this keyboard, they knew it was a military designed one, but they didn't know it was hardware that few had the privilege of using.
The keyboard and trackball were created in the late 1980s when the US Air Force launched a program called Rapid Execution and Combat Targeting, or REACT, to update the control. The main goal of REACT was to make it easier to retarget both individual missiles and the entire nuclear missile fleet, which was traditionally a process that took weeks, but by the 90s had been reduced to less than a day with the new hardware.
The hardware used in the Minuteman III nuclear missile silos was updated three decades ago, but instead of being sent to the junkyard, some of them ended up on eBay.
The Air Force's new REACT consoles took years to design and develop before being implemented, and there was little chance that the firstusb ports would be available in time. The keyboard and trackball needed a complete teardown, some clever reverse engineering, and the use of an Arduino Pro Micro to get key inputs translated to ausb port that could be connected to modern computers.
