








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.