Golf Portable: Small by design - big in business

Goupil was a French company that had been established in 1979, but which mostly produced computers for the French government.

By the mid 1980s, the company was producing IBM compatibles - including a licenced copy of the Kaypro 2000 - but struggled in the face of companies like Compaq and Olivetti, which had much bigger marketing budgets[source: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/16195/Goupil-Golf-286-10-HD40/]. 

After its core government market collapsed in the latter half of the 1980s, it started progressively inflating its sales figures and became the subject of a criminal investigation in 1991, after it declared bankruptcy with debts of 700 million Francs[source: https://www.lesechos.fr/1991/07/la-cob-transmet-le-dossier-smt-goupil-a-la-justice-950724], which is about [[70|1991]] million in [[now]].

The Goupil Golf was a not-quite-laptop portable machine based around a 10MHz Intel 80286, with 640K RAM, a hard disk and just two expansion slots, but only for short-length expansion cards.

It actually reviewed very well, with Simon Jones writing in a benchtest of the machine in January 1988's PCW that:

~"If you need high-resolution graphics and portability then there aren't many rivals for the Golf. It has the best liquid crystal screen I've seen. The Goupil Golf is certainly a fast machine for its class - you might have to go to a 386-based machined to beat it. With its 40 or 100MB of on-board mass storage and up to 4.64MB of RAM, it is not short of space. On price, it beats the nearest competition by up to £500. The only thing you might want to put on a wish list is a buit-in modem, but you could use one of the two expansion slots for that. Apart from thatm the Golf comes top of my shortlist for the 'Transportable of the Year' award.[source: Goupil Golf Benchtest, Simon Jones, PCW, January 1988, p. 134]".

The Golf retailed for £3,475, which is about [[3475|1989]] in [[now]].