An Interesting Marquardt Switch Find…

So, in full transparency, I’ve been really late to getting around to sharing this piece of switch history with you all. Well over a year ago, I was pointed in the direction of a user (who I since can not find the information of) on r/mechmarket selling an old advertisement catalogue of Marquardt Keyboard Switches from 1978/1979. Marquardt, for those of you unaware of this vintage switch manufacturer, is a German company that produced switches for keyboards for many decades and even some full keyboards of their own in the mid 1990’s. The most famous of these boards being the Marquardt Mini-Ergo, which is at least stated by Deskthority to be the first split-design keyboard to be released on the market. I purchased this catalogue on the promise that I would eventually get this hosted on the website, and even though it is many, many months and a significant number of life events since then, this is fulfilling that promise I once made to that gracious person who sold this to me. I’d also like to think it acts as a little bit of a neat Christmas gift to all of you who are fans of switches, since as far as I can find this is noticeably older than any other Marquardt Switch documentation that I can find from the few keyboard sources that out there that have information as such.

Each page of the catalogue, as well as the front and back catalogue, are presented in read order below in the form of images given that Squarespace wants to attempt to charge me an arm and a leg just to embed a PDF file. If you’d rather browse through a probably higher resolution version of this, please find it linked here.

As well, if you or someone you know has documentation like this lying around - I would love to scan it and/or get scans of it to upload as future Shorts as well.