Welcome to a 'small' picture documentation of an insane cherry find. I'm sorry for the picture quality as most boards look way more yellowed than they are in reality, but I'm not a professional photographer and I don't have more possibilities here at the moment. It's a total of 4 boards so let's just start with the boring ones:
The first one is a Cherry G80-1000 HAO with B05 date code.
- G80-1000 HAO
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It's in nib condition and comes with it's original packaging and the coil is still in its plastic wrap. Sadly some caps are missing and it seems like that the owner wanted to change the caps from HAO to HAN as all caps except the + ? \ cap which belongs to the original HAO layout. Either way the main caps are still there and it should be possible to get a full set for some nordic nerd.
Let's go right to the 2nd board. It's a G80-1600, nothing special about that one, right Mike?
- G80-1600 top view
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It's a prototype from 1988, I'm not familiar with the 1600 models but the rubber feet are way different to the normal 1000 cases. Additionally the dip switch is different and the board doesn't feature the two super black switches which are normally placed in the winkey positions. I haven't made any further investigations as this board will go to another forum member. This board is uncleaned and the other boards arrived in a similar condition.
The next board is this one:
- G80-2100 top view
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Yes, that's a G80-2100 in a G80-2000 case, it's a G80-2100 HAO prototype from 1989.
- G80-2100 HAO and HCD
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This is a comparisson to a later G80-2100 HCD. The board features rare HAO caps with english sublegends. The build quality of the board is insane, the PCB is screwed to the case, the Metal backplate is screwed to the case too. In total this boards has 23 screws until everything is build together.
You probably ask yourself: what can be better than such a board? It's this one:
- G80-0418 top view
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It's a Cherry G80-0418. According to some chinese article about the history of Cherry, Cherry announced the G80-0312 and 0320 in 1983 as the first Cherry mx boards, in 1984 they announced the G80-0413 for IBM computers (which can be seen here:
https://i.imgur.com/P1lmJFU.jpg ,
https://i.imgur.com/33GIZnl.jpg Seems like cherry made these boards until 1989 even if they must have been heavily outdated at the time) and they announced the G80-0418 for apple computers. As the Cherry mx black was announced in 1984 too these could be the first boards which were announced with todays mx black switch. This board is plate mounted and features brown doubleshot modifier keycaps, some of them are thin and some thick abs doubleshots. For the alphas every keycap is doubleshot but many legends are not sharp, it feels like that they used some blank doubleshot molds (as seen in some beamspring boards) and then printed the legends onto it. If somebody has more data about when cherry had all of their doubleshot moldings finished or if my thinking is wrong please share it with us. Interestingly the board does not feature homing keys but the F key is clearly doubleshot, so cherry invested into these molds.
The board is build with a metal plate and plate mount switches, it uses mx blacks and cherry pcb mount screw in stabs of an old generation. The space bar features a Cherry mx "space black" switch which is stonger than a normal mx grey but not as strong as a mx super black switch. I'd guess that it's around 100-120g but I am not able to measure that by myself. The sticker on the plate does not indicate a build date but the printing on the pcb could indicate that it's build on the 21.05.87, but that's just a speculation as you could read other dates with that blurry printing. The serial number is 521 and the board has a 15 pin connector. The pinout can be seen in the wiki file of the board (
wiki/File:G80-0418.pdf). Does anybody know which Apple computers of that time used a 15 pin connector, as far as I know Apple introduced ADB in 1985, before that they used some TRS like connector for their M0110 board. If anybody has info on that and if there is a way to convert this board I'd be happy if he can shares it. Now some more pictures of the board:
Last but not least: a small gimmick which the seller included into the box: an OG cherry color code chip, I didn't even know that these things exist
- OG cherry color chip
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Additions to the wiki will be made soon, if somebody want's to be faster than me he can use my pictures too. I hope you enjoyed the picture documentation of the find