deskthority

I recently aqcuired this Goupil Golf 286 with Cherry G80-1861HAU. It has a 10mHz 286 processor, 640k ram with 4MB expaneded memory, 40MB hard drive and a 3.5" floppy drive. It has a 320p monochrome lcd that is powered from the primary unit with a clever folding stand which close and locks down on the base for transporting. It has an interesting feature control that you can invert the display to a negative or positive setting as well as the brightness and contrast.
It is surprisingly crisp and easy to read unlike the first color lcd display I had in the late 90's.
It has an ISA slot for expansion, but it seems to be malfunction as the computer will not boot when populated. It also needs a new cmos battery which is some odd type that is like a AA but with wire coming out of the ends that plugs into a 2pin on the motherboard. I was hoping to be able to upgrade the storage with a 128MB CF card (as far a I can make out from the bios settings it's the largest it can support) to replace the old hard drive, but it seems that there is no disk controller in the motherboard, but is instead part of the drive itself.
It still has it's original factory instalation of Windows 3.1 in French and quite oddly a German version of office. It feels surprisingly responsive and speedy even though the system is so slow hardware by todays standards.
As For the keyboard, it has some unique characteristic. Most notable the case body has a bevel on all sides not just the front like the standard 1800 case body. Also the doubleshots have an industrial grey on beige colorway that seem to have only been used on Goupil branded Cherry. It has black switches and sadly the typical 2KRO as most other 1800. The label states it was made in 1989 in West Germany by Cherry.
Overall it is in excellent condition both functionally and cosmetically. As I understand it they are not a very common system as they were not very popular and not many were made due to the stiff competition of similar models from larger companies like Compaq. It seems even more rare to have one in US ANSI variant. I am quite happy to have been able to add this keyboard to my collection and having it's original system as wel is a very nice bonus. Now if only I could find it's original mouse to make it complete again.

This is really a great find!

It is odd that it comes with French windows, German word and US keyboard.

I do not wonder that the display is easily readable. By 1989, LC monochrome-displays where around by a long enough time to be a well developed technology.

For the mouse, you will need a black one which should be a rare item. How does the mouse connect?

The mouse uses some connection called inport bus mouse. They seem really hard to find and I have no recollection of them existing myself. I am guessing they were short lived or unpopular?

Bus mice use quadrature. Basically, almost all of the electronics are removed from the mouse, and the raw optomechanical encoder outputs are sent to the computer.

So, there are ways to adapt a modern USB optical mouse to it, as many of the optical mouse controllers actually output quadrature.

Interesting, so how does one do that? I'm really not that fussed with having a mouse as they really aren't that useful in DOS and 3.1 anyway. I more just want the original for collector purpose more than anything.

Not that useful in 3.1? O_o

http://www.ian-nic.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/mouse/ Don't trust the pinout, though, it's for the Acorn implementation, and I think the Microsoft implementation is incompatible.

I guess I should have phrased it as not that useful to me. I'm only using it to play some old games and such, which to my knowledge dosen't make use of mouse at all. Using the keyboard to navigate in 3.1 isn't much bother.

It's my first computer : goupil golf 286. My father raised the ram to 4mb.
I cannot remember how many hour of play with test drive, dune. chess, bubble bubble. And also coding in TP6 and ASM.
My good old time, i should check at my parent's house, i think the kb might still be usable !