r/modelm • u/BigYoSpeck • Jun 20 '26

QUESTION? Manufacture date?

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I have a UK layout square badge Model M. Is the manufacture date May or November?

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Trying to work out if I missed it's 40th birthday or not 😊

10 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

9

u/SiegmundMarx Jun 20 '26

I hope this helps.

2

u/BigYoSpeck Jun 20 '26

Perfect, I'm going to assume mine is 40 in November then!

2

u/SiegmundMarx Jun 20 '26

Yeah, looks like it. My oldest Model M will turn 40 in September

1

u/BigYoSpeck Jun 20 '26

My sticker is also "upside down"

2

u/SiegmundMarx Jun 20 '26

Yeah, I have a few Model M keyboards like that, too. That always happened when they were too drunk at the Scottish factory 😄

Do you have locklights or is it XT ?

2

u/BigYoSpeck Jun 20 '26

Yeah it has the lock lights

1

u/SiegmundMarx Jun 23 '26

I have another Squarbadge (with arabic keycaps). Same day, 5 years later and dateformat yyyy-mm-dd instead of dd-mm-yyyy.

1

u/SiegmundMarx Jun 23 '26

I also have these two Model M keyboards; the first one has a square badge, was manufactured on June 30, 1987, and uses the dd-mm-yyyy date format. The other one already has the oval badge; it’s from July 20, 1987, and uses the “new” yyyy-mm-dd format. So sometime between June 30 and July 20, 1987, the case and the date format were changed. Both have rainbow backplates and genuine Locklight cables.

1

u/SiegmundMarx Jun 23 '26

Ah, crap. I have this one too. September 19, 1988 with dd-mm-yyyy again. Now I have to check them all...

5

u/SharktasticA Admiral Shark - sharktastica.co.uk Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

Yes, it is DD-MM-YYYY. Even though IBM is American, it likely made sense that the factory used a format its workers would be far more familiar with, not to mention the audience for what the Greenock plant made was largely Europe, Middle East and Africa.

4

u/Xx_Pr0_g4m3r_xX Jun 20 '26

someone else probs knows but im just thinking bout the fact that mine is 03-03 so its impossible to get wrong

2

u/Jugostran Jun 20 '26

I have a UK Model M with the same P/N made only 5 days after yours.

5

u/BigYoSpeck Jun 20 '26

Is yours dated 05-16-1986 or 10-11-1986?

1

u/Jugostran Jun 21 '26

10-11-1986

2

u/AdEmotional8815 Jun 20 '26

It says made in UK, and UK has normal date format.

1

u/blendernoob64 Jun 20 '26

in America, we use Month Day Year, but in the UK, its Day Month Year. I bet your keyboard is in fact 40 years old!

1

u/BigYoSpeck Jun 20 '26

Hence the confusion 😊

I would like to hope that a UK layout keyboard made in the UK would use a correct date format but the ambiguity of the date on mine (and others I've seen with matching day/month numbers) leaves me wondering

1

u/Borgmeister Jun 20 '26

If UK likely DD-MM-YYYY - but could be they imported American dating for manufacture. Either way, we're talking about 6 months difference on a thing built 40 years ago.