If you're a computer user "of a certain age," you know that there was a time when room-filling clicking was as synonymous with typing as words appearing... uh, on a sheet of paper. But the typewriters on which generations of office workers and aspiring novelists learned to type weren't the only places you'd find mechanical keyboards. Even throughout the 1980s, they were as common a part of computer setups as floppy disk drives—because the people who were creating and using them knew what typing could, and should, be.

Sadly, with the explosion of the home PC market in the 1990s and into the early 2000s, these sturdy fixtures fell by the wayside as manufacturers looked for cheaper mass-market solutions to getting tens of millions of more people on their machines and online. Typing, that most common of computing activities, became something you and your fingers had to endure.

Luckily, things have swung back around over the last decade, and mechanical keyboards are once again viable, even popular, alternatives to the cheap keyboards that used to be ubiquitous. If you want to buy one, whether because you care about how you type or because you want something that's better designed to withstand the rigors of everyday use to which many users subject their keyboards, here's what you need to know in order to make the right choice.