Like its little brothers Goupil and Goupil 2, the Goupil 3 is based on a back-plane architecture. You get the computer you want by adding different electronic boards. Thus Goupil 3 can be a tri-processor system: Motorola 6809 like its little brothers, Zilog Z80 for CP/M compatibility and Intel 8088 to match the emerging "IBM PC/MS-DOS" movement. The processors don't work simultaneously but can use a time sharing mechanism.
Like the Goupil 2, the Goupil 3 was especially designed for communication, and thus had a built-in modem. Among other things it can emulate the Minitel (French videotext terminal) or connect to data centers.
The 5.25" floppy disk drive can be replaced with an 8" drive (1.2 MB). A 10 MB hard disk was also available as an option.
The Goupil 3 can run under a lot of operating systems: Flex 9 or Uniflex (with the 6809), CP/M (with the Z80) or CP/M 86 or MS-DOS with the 8088.
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I still own one, but it''s been many years since I''ve booted it. Mine has a 5MB HDD and a 5.25" diskette reader. Green-on-Green Display $ but I remember we had connected some to a TV set to get colour display. The graphics card had two modes, 25x80 chars and a graphic mode, 512x256.
6809 processor @2 MHZ, 64 KB RAM + extra 256 KB card $ the 8-bit processor can''t address more than 64KB so we used page swapping to access the extra RAM. Coding was done mostly in ASM. Another use for this RAM card was RAM-disk. Very useful when compiling ASM projects.
I remember using one in our club that had two processors (I think that was the limit) and you switched between processors by hitting the soft-interrupt switch on the front left side$ it took you to a kind of ROM-based debugger shell and you typed commands to switch and reboot. The very-often needed NMI switch (ASM programs tend to freeze more often than not $-)...) was at the back of the unit.
There were no built-in languages $ unlike Goupil 2 that had a Basic in the ROM. Flex came with an assembler and a Basic interpreter.
Tuesday 22nd February 2011
Didier (Hong Kong)
The first real OS-with machine I used. I designed specific I/O Interface boards for it.
Monday 1st August 2016
Régis Schmidt (France)
I had used one as a child. The price seems exact as I recall when my father shelled for one for his statistical research. The screen was not 8 colors as indicated but black-and-green. It had a modem (needed for the Minitel emul and it could actually connect to data centers for number crunching.) Don''t know the speed. I think it only had room for two CPU boards, and i recall there was an actual flip switch on the back to $ the working processor. Don''t know what you mean by "time sharing" but if that''s "power down, switch CPU, power up", then, yes!
Wednesday 29th October 2008
Florian (France)
NAME
Goupil 3
MANUFACTURER
SMT
TYPE
Professional Computer
ORIGIN
France
YEAR
1983
END OF PRODUCTION
Unknown
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
Unknown
KEYBOARD
Full stroke keyboard with numeric keypad, editing keypad and 12 function keys
CPU
Zilog Z80 A / Motorola MC6809 / Intel 8088
SPEED
4 MHz (Z80) / 2 MHz (6809) / 4 MHz (8088)
CO-PROCESSOR
Optional numeric processor
RAM
64 KB (up to 1 MB)
VRAM
Unknown
ROM
40 KB (Basic) + 4 KB (Bootstrap 6809)
TEXT MODES
25 x 80
GRAPHIC MODES
none (optional 512 x 256)
COLORS
black & green original display (optional 8 color feature)
