I was part of a group touring HP labs in the mid-1970s.
They showed us how they computed the key dimensions and typography with an (HP) minicomputer, then had it print out the commands for some kind of numerically controlled cutting machine on paper tapes using an old ASR33 teletype.
The cutting machine generated moulds for the injection moulding machines making the keys.
The keys are in two parts: light coloured digits and symbols and darker plastic forming the shape of the key itself and surrounding the lighter symbol plastic. As a result, they can be worn down but they can never wear out.
Alpha had a lot of implementation problems, e.g. floating point exceptions with untraceable execution paths.
Cray tried to build the T3E (iirc) out of Alphas. DEC bragged how good Alpha was for parallel computing, big memory etc etc.
But Cray publicly denounced Alpha as unusable for parallel processing (the T3E was a bunch of Alphas in some kind of NUMA shared memory.) It was so difficult to make the chips work together.
This was in the Cray Connect or some such glossy publication. Wish I'd kept a copy.
Plus of course the usual DEC marketing incompetence. They feared Alpha undoing their large expensive machine momentum. Small workstation boxes significantly faster than big iron.
They showed us how they computed the key dimensions and typography with an (HP) minicomputer, then had it print out the commands for some kind of numerically controlled cutting machine on paper tapes using an old ASR33 teletype.
The cutting machine generated moulds for the injection moulding machines making the keys.
The keys are in two parts: light coloured digits and symbols and darker plastic forming the shape of the key itself and surrounding the lighter symbol plastic. As a result, they can be worn down but they can never wear out.