The Mystery of the Unexpected Orange Capped Keyboard

Two years ago, a mysterious package arrived on my porch. It contained a computer keyboard from a company I had never heard of and with no sign of where it came from. Keyboards do not usually show up unannounced.

The puzzling package left few clues. No invoice. No note. Just a generic, Chinese-sourced “Metoo Zero X 78” keyboard and an envelope filled with a complete extra set of keycaps in orange. Yes, orange.

I scanned my e-mail for days after receiving the board hoping for an explanation.

Manufacturers regularly contact Open for Business in hopes they can send demos of their wares to us for review. Was this package from a company hoping for attention? As strange as it would be to send a product out without saying anything first, an unidentified keyboard arriving already fits “strange.”

Admittedly, I have a bit of a keyboard problem, so I had other possibilities to consider.

My whole series of keyboard reviews began as a quest to find the perfect keyboard — satisfying tactile feel, refined aesthetics and integration with my favored MacOS platform. Along the way, I went from someone needing a keyboard to an unintentional keyboard collector.

When the package arrived, my quest had already familiarized me with the shape of a keyboard box well enough to immediately think I was unpacking a keyboard. The shape was the only part of the arrival that wasn’t baffling.

A crowdfunded keyboard project I had jumped on was supposed to arrive soon — was this it? It wasn’t.

I’ve backed — never mind, I don’t need to mention how many keyboard crowdfunding campaigns I have gotten myself into — I’ve backed some. In recent years, I typically avoid unknown makers of keyboards though — too risky.

Maybe someone wanted to give me a keyboard? I wrote my friend and OFB colleague Dennis E. Powell a few days into the puzzle. He was responsible for my infection with the keyboard enthusiast’s bug years earlier, regaling me with stories of his legendary IBM Model M, after all. Ruling out a keyboard I bought, I chased the wild idea maybe he’d sent it.

It was a stretch. This board was not the sort I would imagine his cup of matcha, but I was about as out of straws to grasp as a person in Starbucks. When was the last time you had an unidentified keyboard show up on your porch?

Maybe he’d come across an extra one and sent it my way? No, he assured me, he had no idea about the package.

My mind returned to the two crowdfunded keyboards I was waiting on. As fun as it is to discover a previously undiscovered maker of something on a crowdfunding site, I was cautious to avoid the unknown for good reason. The Kickstarter and Indiegogo communities have mostly served me well, but of the handful of failed projects I’ve gotten involved with, two of them are keyboard projects. Once shame on you. Twice shame on me. Thrice… No thanks.

As basic as a keyboard is, one might assume amongst the ambitious things put forth in the crowdfunding world, such a device ought to be a safer bet. I thought so when I backed a project for a hall effect keyboard, “the Keystone,” in 2019. Five years later and counting, that keyboard has never met my hands or those of any other project backer.

I remember anticipating the Keystone for weeks before I even backed it. I had been shopping for the perfect mechanical keyboard for several years by that point and everything about the board screamed, “This is it.” Well, other than ever shipping.

At least they regularly posted updates until December 2023, which provided some hope that it might still materialize.

Eventually, after pandemic setbacks repeatedly delayed it and I needed a new keyboard without further delay, I found another one to do the job.

I said the Keystone was one of two keyboards I had been waiting on when the mystery one arrived. The other, an Epomaker, did arrive and became part of my regular rotation.

But this enigmatic keyboard refused to tell me its story. The keyboard itself was unremarkable, but its curious arrival made me keep returning to it. Why had someone sent me a hard-to-identify mechanical keyboard and the accompanying bag of not just keycaps, but orange keycaps?

A month or two ago I had been rearranging keyboards in my office — don’t laugh — and as I came to that one, I mused on its permanently mysterious existence. The keyboard seemed destined to keep its secret locked inside forever.

It did, until this week.

Last month, Lexar did a Kickstarter project for a small storage drive capable of attaching to the iPhone’s MagSafe magnetic back and storing video footage as it is recorded via USB-C. I frequently need a way to shuffle video footage I record for ministry off of my iPhone, so I jumped. Never would I have thought I was getting the bonus of unlocking the two-year-old mystery keyboard’s story as an additional perk.

If you have crowdfunded a project, you know that there are a few “follow-up” sites out there that creators often use to handle fulfillment after the campaign ends. Lexar sent me over to PledgeBox for this step. I hadn’t used that site in years; most projects I’ve bought into favored BackerKit instead.

I dutifully filled in the PledgeBox form and, mindlessly, agreed to create a PledgeBox account to track the shipping status. The tracking page pre-populated not just with the Lexar order, but also two long-ago projects I had backed. One was the other vaporware keyboard I had backed.

Two years after the infamous Keystone, I found another one that looked exactly like what I was hoping for. The Keytion.

I had been wanting a keyboard sporting the more wear-resistant keycaps made of PBT and were “double shot” to allow backlighting to shine through (think MacBook keyboard). Even today that arrangement is rare (the Keystone was another rare duck to promise it), but the Keytion claimed to offer that in the especially rare form of a keyboard with Mac-friendly modifier keycaps.

I jumped. And then after the campaign was funded, the creator disappeared never to be heard from again.

In the months thereafter, I’d occasionally check and see other disappointed backers musing on how they’d been scammed out of money, but that was about it. Eventually, I quit looking.

When Lexar’s post-backing survey led me to the PledgeBox site and I saw that old entry, I clicked on it, wistfully reminiscing on what might have been. I tapped the failed project’s “comments” tab and saw people had posted several odd comments since I’d last looked.

Several of them involved receiving generic, Chinese-brand keyboards. And then the words that brought it together: several people had also received orange keycaps.

The vaporware keyboard project that never did produce the amazing, PBT-capped, Mac-friendly Keytion keyboard did apparently get ahold of some off-brand lots of keyboards and sent them out to backers a year or so late, along with those orange keycaps, without so much as even bothering to take credit.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Of all the sources I’d imagined for the unidentifiable keyboard, a Kickstarter project’s creator who hightailed it with the proceeds a year before the package arrived was not amongst my guesses.

Unsure of where it came from and with keyboards I knew the provenance of occupying my time, the cryptic board kept a place of puzzlement in my mind but never settled onto my desk. Finally decrypted, I pulled it out and gave it a spin. Then, doing the only thing possibly appropriate with a keyboard packed with a sack of unusually bright keycaps, I set about turning it orange for the autumn.

My mystery keyboard finally had an identifiable origin, now it had a chance to show off its unique aesthetic too. While it wasn’t the keyboard I tried to obtain, I now have just one Kickstarter board pending and my desk looks more seasonal than a Pumpkin Spice Latte.