Sadly, the best keyboards ever made by mankind were the MIT AI Lab (about the same as the Stanford AI Lab) keyboards, custom manufactured by the now-defunct Mic

Sadly, the best keyboards ever made by mankind were the MIT AI Lab (about the same as the Stanford AI Lab) keyboards, custom manufactured by the now-defunct Microswitch corporation. The second-generation versions (LLL and Sun/Symbolics keyboards) were not up to snuff, but were still pretty spectacular. It's hard to describe the feel of the original AI Lab (Tom Knight) keyboards--even though they had a fairly long throw, the action was so smooth and natural as to defy imagination. I even bought into a custom run of the LLL keyboards (second or third generation), at $600 each, and jerry-rigged a little home-made 68K processor board to translate the up/down signals into standard ASCII serial keycodes using a UART. Oh well...