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!
It sure looks cool though.
