What Could Be Cooler Than Typing on a Keyboard Salvaged From a Nuclear Missile Silo?

Knowing the historical past of their {hardware} is usually as vital to keyboard fans as the texture and sounds of the keys they’re pounding away on all day. But it’s onerous to think about a keyboard having a more interesting backstory than this weird structure that was salvaged from a Minuteman III nuclear missile silo.

The Nuclear Keyboard, because the YouTube channel Pointless Tinkering refers to this Cold War relic, was initially bought on eBay together with an identical trackball accent due to its fascinating structure that features particular operate keys marked with ominous labels like “GO TO VOICE,” “INITIATE,” and a giant blue “ABORT” button which ought to actually be a regular button on each keyboard. When bought there was little question this was a keyboard designed and utilized by the navy, however as Pointless Tinkering dug deeper into its origins, they found it was really {hardware} that only a few had the privilege of working.

The keyboard and trackball’s origin dates again to the late Nineteen Eighties when the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) initiated a 632 million greenback program referred to as Rapid Execution and Combat Targeting, or REACT, for brief, whose objective was to replace the management programs in nuclear missile silos that had been in use because the Sixties and 70s. The most important objective of REACT was to make it a lot simpler to retarget each particular person missiles, and the Air Force’s total nuclear missile fleet, which was historically a course of that took weeks, however by the 90s had been decreased to lower than a day with the brand new {hardware}.

That was three a long time in the past, nevertheless, and the {hardware} used within the Minuteman III nuclear missile silos has been up to date once more, however as a substitute of sending the REACT consoles to the junkyard, in true capitalist vogue, a few of them ended up on eBay.

The first USB ports solely began exhibiting up in computer systems round 1998, and there was little probability it was obtainable in time for the Air Force’s new REACT consoles which undoubtedly took years to design and develop earlier than being applied. As a consequence, the keyboard and trackball communicated by the previous RS422 protocol, requiring a whole teardown, some intelligent reverse engineering, and using an Arduino Pro Micro to get key inputs translated to a USB port that may very well be linked to trendy computer systems.

The trackball additionally required some in depth TLC to get it again in easy working order, however given its age, it doesn’t seem like as dependable or correct as trendy trackballs. On high of that, customized software program needed to be developed to get each gadgets to play good with one thing apart from computer systems designed to launch nuclear missiles, and that can be downloaded here should you occur to return throughout a Minuteman III REACT console to name your personal however don’t have a nuclear missile silo to go along with it.