#itfurry

I recently picked up this Compaq PS/2 keyboard from my E-waste job in excellent condition. We rarely save keyboards and separate the cords and send them downstream for processing and that was the case with this one. Luckily I found a cut keyboard-less cord from a Wyse KB-9933 to splice on.

The first thing I did was strip the wires and found that the two keyboards used entirely different color codes. Because I had the Wyse PS/2 connector, I could get the pinout, but I found myself in a unique situation with the Compaq without its connector.

I first identified the positive wire by seeing which wire was absolutely needed to power the LEDs and called it a night, worried I fried the chip and would have to go through 25+ combinations.

EIGHTY ONE COMBINATIONS LETS GO

The next day I identified the ground wire by looking at where the negative side of the capacitors on the PCB terminated. I found an article with photos of the PCB on the Kazakh tech blog WASP.kz so I didn’t have to do further disassembly.

Source: WASP.kz

I had a 50-50 shot on the clock and data wires which I just decided to match by color brightness, and paired yellow and white and brown and green. I also found out that PS/2 peripherals were not intended to be hot swappable so I had to restart my computer to boot it.

It worked! Now I was on my way to a 90’s beige setup I may eventually get around to completing. I then soldered the wires with my very rusty soldering skills, and plugged it in again and it somehow still worked!

The final pinout.