deskthority

In my years of collecting Cherry vintage products, I came to the conclusion that this is perhaps the most rare Cherry keyboard, released to the mass market. Definitely more rare even so than the G80-5000 Ergo-Plus. First announced in December 1990, the Cherry Mouseboard was revealed and reviewed at IFA 1991 and demonstrated in the German TV Show "Highscore" in mid 1991.

I believe there were less than 2000 of these boards made in total, going by serial numbers found across the net. It also seems that despite being available in at least German, French and US ANSI layout, all variants used the same base keyboard from the same production run and were manually adjusted/modified to the according layout. German variants have been sighted with the same "HAU" product code, normally indicating US ANSI layout.


The mouseboard was Cherry's attempt to combine a mouse and a keyboard into one beast of a weird input device.



The base keyboard design looks similar to a G80-3000, with no cursor keys and two extra keys.



The core part of the mouseboard is the obscure as hell "mouse slider", which combines both, a mouse and the cursor keys. Depending on the mode setup the movement of the device can be interpreted to cursor keys. When in "mouse mode", the cursor keys on the top of device act as normal "keyboard" cursor keys.



Manual adjustments - unknown if made by the previous owner of Cherry Corp


Cherry MX Black and full N-Key rollover.


Made in 1991 - of course, since the board never made it into a second production run. This is the only Cherry vintage keyboard in my collection that does not use the fancy two-color red and black Cherry printing on the case and just comes in a brown OEM like box.


Tons of manuals, information sheets, pinout diagrams and technical drawings


Copyright 1989 Logitech... huh? Maybe if this collaboration still existed, we would see better keyboards from either company nowadays.


The core "mouse slider" unit


Dedicated micro controller, very unusual for Cherry


Firmware EPROM - Again with manual labeling and adjustments.

Released at 299,00 DM (~150 EUR) originally, the board did not last in the market for long. It seems it never made it past the first revision and was quickly taken off the market again. Nowadays reaching crazy prices with Asian collectors, I most likely would never have been able to bring my collection one step closer to complementation if it wasn't for 42.tar.gz letting me have this one at a very humanly affordable price. Thank you very much!

PS: Scanning all the manuals in a bit. Doubt many are interested, since there is not much to see, but just for preservation!

How do you operate the mouse? You slide the entire square unit?

Yes. If the "mouse" LED key is active, it acts as a mouse. If its off, it acts as cursor keys to the according position... really funky.

Aah, I saw that board before and thought it was a cursor mouse. What do you do when you want to move more to the top left than it allows? And where are the mouse buttons?

webwit wrote:Aah, I saw that board before and thought it was a cursor mouse. What do you do when you want to move more to the top left than it allows? And where are the mouse buttons?

It is 400 dpi btw.

That's very cool, how is it in use?

Its very... unusual. I can't speak for the mouse use yet, since it uses a giant 25 pin connector. They do provide the pinout though, maybe it can be converted?

Also, I love their hybrid English/German documents. So typical for Germans.

No Funktion!

I remember one place where I saw it. That Chinese guy who sold me the ugly VX 5000. I bet he's still trying to sell his other boards on Yahoo Auctions Japan.

Yeah he is. He has both the G80-5000 and this up for like $6000 each. Dunno what he expects. Suppose after the v80 sale he went dipshit insane.

Also I just noticed, if you check this pic, you can see there is another sticker under it. I just used a LED flashlight to see through it.. kinda. Reads G80-5300 with a different production date. Cherry loves typos.

His box. And other stuff.

Aha. That explains why my box is different. It seems to be a slide-over sleeve, which I am missing. Another 20 years to hunt that one. Yay!

I have the same manuals too.. the thickest one is actually just for the drawing program, that came with it for free apparently. Made by Logitech.

Reminds me of Deluxpaint on the Amiga.

Manual done scanning. Page 2 is duplicated and flipped, sorry about that, too lazy to fix.

sixty wrote:Its very... unusual. I can't speak for the mouse use yet, since it uses a giant 25 pin connector. They do provide the pinout though, maybe it can be converted?

Teensy project It sure looks cool though.

Very interesting keyboard, thanks for the pics!

sixty wrote:Copyright 1989 Logitech... huh? Maybe if this collaboration still existed, we would see better keyboards from either company nowadays.

IIRC, Logitech was the OEM for the trackball in the Lexmark M5-2 trackball keyboard.

sixty wrote:Its very... unusual. I can't speak for the mouse use yet, since it uses a giant 25 pin connector. They do provide the pinout though, maybe it can be converted?

Is it not just a 25-pin serial plug?

daedalus wrote:Is it not just a 25-pin serial plug?

Probably is?

Now you need to find the 25 pin version of something like this:

webwit wrote:Now you need to find the 25 pin version of something like this:

Could always make a giant adapter circle. 25 pin -> 9 pin -> usb. Oh yeah... someone would still have to write a driver I guess

What is the estimate worth of this keyboard nowadays?