The nice thing about a hit show like Severance is that there's no shortage of fellow nerds trying to dissect every inch of the series, so thankfully there was able to track down a fair amount of information about the computers on the internet.
While I was going down this rabbit hole I ended up finding a few websites and articles on Severance that were very interesting but not applicable at all for my build needs. But if you like the show I'd highly recommend checking out a few of these:
The Design
The basic gist is that the computer was designed to help accentuate the show's weird vibes, but this blurb from a Variety article interviewing the show's Production Designer Jeremy Hindle probably does a better job of explaining the thought behind this design than I ever could:
"Hindle’s vision of the MDR office as a playground extended to the designs of the employees’ computers, which are used to sort through mysterious data for a purpose unexplained to the audience and the characters. While creating the office supplies, Hindle established rules for the show’s world, chief among them that all items would be manufactured internally by Lumon as opposed to being outsourced from other companies. He based the design of the computers on bulky, toylike early computers like iMacs, and built the screen using CRT glass with a touch screen glass. For the mouse, he created a trackball for the actors to operate, with the goal of making it feel anachronistic and slightly alien."
(Source:
Variety)
I found an extremely helpful blog post from adafruit that pointed me in the direction of the computer model Severance used as inspiration as well as information on the exact keyboard cap models used and even a couple of behind-the-scenes-photos from someone who supposedly helped build them:
I also looked around to see if anyone else was already building one of these, but surprisingly I didn't find anything besides a small-scale replica someone built powered by a Raspberry Pi (Github link). It's hard to believe that no one has tried building a replica Lumon computer yet given how popular the show is, so I think I'll likely come across someone else building one eventually.
The Computer
The computer's design was inspired by the Data General Dasher, first built in 1977. I can see why they chose it; the machine is big and boxy with the same kind of retrofuturistic style that would feel at home in a Jetsons episode. Not much was changed for the Severance computers compared to the original computer's body/monitor.
The only thing I haven't managed to find, unsurprisingly, is a photograph of the back of the Severance computers. So I may just need to improvise that side a teeny bit. C'est la vie.
The Keyboard
On the keyboard side of things, it's a very strange layout for a very strange fictional job. The main area follows a mostly standard QWERTY layout with a few changes, but the right side is a completely fictional set of keys I think we can safely assume are something to do with macrodata refinement. And to top it all off there's a giant trackball in place of a mouse.
My favorite little tidbit about this keyboard, courtesy of the Severance team:
“The keyboard doesn’t have an escape key on purpose because the people down there on the sever ed floor can’t ever escape,” she said. “It’s subconsciously creating and supporting the world that our story is living in.”
-Catherine Miller, Prop Master
(Source:
NY Times)
According to Reddit the Dasher & Dance SA Keycap Set were the keycaps used for the Lumon computers, but that set is no longer being sold. The current MT3 Dasher Keycap set is going for $75 and also pretty close to the original keys.
A few companies are already selling keyboards to cash in on the tech nerd enthusiasm for all things Severance (hopefully it's obvious I'm including myself in this category). But most of them are very expensive and all of them are standard keyboards that won't help me here. Plus I just can't bring myself to spend that much money on a mechanical keyboard when I've been using the same wireless Logitech keyboard for at least the last decade without any problems whatsoever.
The best version I’ve found so far is from a Redditor named “panacamanana” who built a replica to use as their daily keyboard. Their explanations in the comments about how they designed everything for the keyboard as well as the tech stack/services they used is a great guide for me to eventually build out my replica’s keyboard.
