Japan · 4 keyboards

Realforce (Topre)

Realforce is the keyboard line of Topre, a Tokyo company founded in 1935 as Tokyo Press Kogyo that still makes stamped car parts and truck refrigeration units. Topre started building terminal keyboards in 1976, and in the late 1970s a young engineer, inspired by a coiled mosquito incense stick, came up with the conical-spring capacitive switch the company still uses. Those switches went into bank and data-entry keyboards across Japan long before Topre sold its first consumer board, the Realforce 106, in July 2001. It had 45g keys with lighter 30g keys under the little fingers, the variable weighting Realforce still offers. The R2 generation of 2017 brought silent switches and the APC actuation-depth setting to the main line, and the R3 of 2021 added Bluetooth. Topre also supplies the switches inside the HHKB Professional.