Mechanical keyboard nuts generally love old vintage keyboard designs—and so does Severance, Apple TV’s smash-hit, high-concept sci-fi series set in a dystopian office. Atomic Keyboard decided to combine these inspirations when it made the MDR Dasher, a revival of a classic design from the Data General Corporation in the 1970s.
The Data General’s Dasher terminal series is iconic, with many classic keyboard fans loving its chunky blue keys and huge layout in particular. The Lumon employee cubicle setups in Severance are heavily inspired by—possibly even salvaged from—terminals like the Dasher 6053 from 1977, though they have an altered layout and a trackball mouse area. As DesignBoom notes, the keyboards seen on the show have no Escape, no Control, and no Option keys. It is a dystopia, after all.
Atomic Keyboard
Atomic Keyboard’s recreation of the massive design element keeps the blue and beige hues and the big black optical trackball on the right side, with two oversized mouse keys. The current design features a 73-key layout in a unique 70% design, an aluminum case, and a USB-C connection, in case you actually want to use it on something manufactured in this century. It’s in pre-production now.
When will you be able to buy one? Who knows. Atomic Keyboard is accepting email signups and has a preliminary price of $400, which isn’t unreasonable in the space of big, custom, small-batch keyboard designs. But with the chaos surrounding international trade at the moment, who knows how much it’ll cost when it’s finally ready to head out to buyers?
Atomic Keyboard
Retro tech is all the rage now, as seen in Severance and the computers from Marvel’s Time Variance Authority in Loki. It’s a retro-futurist style that the Fallout games have been playing with for decades, and some observers are calling it “Cassette Futurism.” You can even see it in the trailer for Naughty Dog’s new game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, with a bounty hunter’s Porsche spaceship filled with a CD-based jukebox, chunky keyboards, printers, and CRT screens that look like they fell off the original Alien set.