I really enjoy the brief period just after the release of IBM PC, where manufacturers could see where things were heading, but were still trying different things to set themselves apart.
Sirius 1 had the weird floppy drive and unusal high-res graphics. Apricot had Display-in-keyboard and compact form factors. Olivetti had charming italian design and the strange upside-down motherboard (when battery leaks it drips down instead of eating the PCB, talk about ahead of its time!)
All ran MS-DOS but not "PC compatible", so none of them really took off. Then everyone started to do 100% compatible clones, and it was a race to the bottom.
> "Then everyone started to do 100% compatible clones, and it was a race to the bottom."
Maybe in the "who can make the cheapest clone" business. Because post-consolidation, plenty of outfits offered machines that set themselves apart. They had to.
I wouldn't even call it a "race" to the bottom. It took until maybe 1995 for prices to drop enough for some of the clone manufacturers to start going out of business. Radio Shack caught on around 1991 and got out early, but Zeos didn't go out of business until 1995 for instance.
Which is why nowadays vertical integration like everyone was doing back then is back.
As survivor of that era, Apple proved the point of higher margins, and the remaining OEMs want a piece of the pie, even better if it is ARM based instead of x86.
Windows 2 was an interesting moment in computing history.
Microsoft wasn't the dominant player and was sort of the underdog in many ways. Lotus was usually considered a more important company (Lotus 123 was huge) and WordStar dominated word processing.
The idea of the office suite hadn't taken off.
There were multiple competing GUI shells (GEM was popular and considered better than Windows).
Other non-PC, non-Mac computers were legitimate choices. Commodore, Atari, Tandy, Amstrad all had non-PC lines that sold really well.
One of my childhood computers was a Tandy 2000. This was a 186-based PC-incompatible computer available from Radio Shack. It was more performant than an AT, could access more base memory (due to a disk-based rather than ROM BIOS), and available at a lower price so it was a real contender before it was clear that the IBM standard would be used by everybody.
Not only could it run Windows 1.0, Microsoft used the Tandy 2000 internally for Windows development because in the early 1980s it was the only x86 machine out there that could do hi-res (640x400) color graphics. So, getting Windows 2.x backported to the 2000 is definitely feasible.
I just checked the Tandy 2000 Windows pre-installation - it has the drivers unpacked, which means you can just get the Slow Boot Windows 2.0, and put the drivers from this floppy to it. And the fonts, of course. Definitely do not check this bad pirate website that has it: https://winworldpc.com/product/tandy-2000-ms-windows-pre-Ins...
Neither Mindset nor Mindset II. Mindset II had the 640 x 400 four-color mode upgrade. Double-buffered but interlaced. Could be genlocked to another Mindset.
The Tandy 2000 could do 640x400 8-color noninterlaced. It was pretty useful as a CAD and DTP workstation, predating even the EGA by a year, which is why it was chosen to develop and test color Windows.
The Mindset machines were (also) advertised as Video Production System, with custom VLSI chips and modules for graphics and video workflows and assorted applications (e. g. Lumena). So a bit of a different market.
I wonder if there's some top-class Japanese x86 machines from the "IBM workalike" era.
Indeed. At the time, Tandy was trying to break into the business market with its computer offerings, and the 2000's software library reflects that, including MultiMate, Basic Four, Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony with hi-res graphic/charting add-ons, a version of Ashton-Tate's Framework, and the best desktop version of AutoCAD available at the time. The Mindset and Amiga lapped it in terms of video, audio, and in particular NTSC- and composite-compatible output capabilities, but machines that were targeting those workflows were doing something very different from the generic business market (which Windows, at the time, was aimed squarely at).
A composite compatible output addon, called the TV/Game Adapter, was planned but never released for the Tandy 2000; if released it might not have supported genlocking or really much beyond getting 16-color 320x200 or so video onto a TV. Until recently the only graphical game I recall actually being released for the machine was a special version of Flight Simulator; but recently on Facebook I saw a photo of a 2000 running some sort of video poker or other card game. It was unlikely to have been very fast paced and may even have been written in GW-BASIC; I don't know much about it.
I did some work for Apricot at their Glenrothes factory around 1985-87.
In my memory they went heavier on GEM than Windows. I never saw an Apricot running Windows prior to the PC-compatible models.
They switched focus to Windows around 1988, I believe - it was around the same time they started using the MCA bus (I believe they ended up as most successful non-IBM MCA vendor), so perhaps they had been convinced by the hype around Windows being a sort of interim OS/2?
Whatever the reason, the Qi-386 (and its ISA-based derivative Xen-i) was often combined with the Deskside Environment Pack, consisting of a trackball, infrared smartcard reader, and Win/386.
My dad's small publishing company had a bunch of them, running Aldus PageMaker and FreeHand. Lovely machines, and about half the price of the equivalent Mac IIs!
I wish I'd been able to "acquire" one of the ACT Apricots that my dad's old work had. They were "portable" in the sense they had a handle very firmly attached, and I think the keyboard (which had a little strip of hotkeys with an LCD screen above - waaay ahead of you, Apple) clipped into the bottom of the unit.
The Apricot F1 was another cool one, about the size of a shoebox with a trackball rather than a mouse - when no-one else had any kind of pointing device!
I have no idea, but I do have a PC/AT keyboard with similarly-shaped keys. They have the usual "square horseshoe" / "anti-roll bar for Matchbox cars" arrangement underneath so they don't rock when you press the end.
I believe you're right. From my limited memory of that period, it was a mechanical constraint.
Keycaps tended to be molded with a hollow cylinder or stalk on their base, which fitted through a snug round aperture on the keyboard base and pressed against a spring or other restraint. Pressing the key down against the spring actuated a pcb-mounted push-switch (or bridged a pair of adjacent connectors on the pcb) that provided the keypress signal. Pressing a wide key off-centre would cause the plastic stalk to bind against the enclosing aperture. Forcing the user to press direcly above the stalk mitigates this - hence the raised part of the keycap.
There is a stack exchange question about this at [1].
As to why the shift keys were wider to begin with, I'm not sure. Perhaps a consequence of the lack of the mechanical constraints that forced typewriter keyboards into a strict grid due to the interleaving of the lever arms. Some keyboards, notably the Commodore PET, didn't use wide shift keys [2] though.
It is worth noting that keyboards in that era were machine-specific, and often hard-wired to the main system box. Afaik standardisation and interoperability didn't happen until RS232 and, later, ps2 keyboards were introduced.
The keyboard on the Apricot uses round capacitive foam pads under the keys. This means the keys had to be square, or they needed a mechanical thing like the space button on the photo here: https://www.baffo71.com/details.php?id_img=7
So, I think it is a mechanical/electrical limitation.
I don't know how many of these Apricot PCs I had as a kid. By the late eighties I was buying them for £1 a piece second hand as nobody wanted them (nobody could figure out why they didn't run PC software). I'd already had a couple of old Sirius 1 computers for a while, so I'd amassed a lot of "DOS compatible" programs that would work, and there was always the hope with every new PC you bought it would have some random new gem hidden on the HDD that you hadn't seen before.
Yours is the later one with the hard disk, the ones that my dad had at work were beige with two floppies. They also had some Sirius 1s, one of which had a hard disk.
Probably all gone in the skip now, the factory is sitting closed and empty.
I seem to recall that I used Windows 2 on a RM Nimbus 80186 at school around 1984. It was for CAM.
Nowadays one of my customers has a sodding great machine that boots DOS 6. To get data files to and from it I use Samba with all the safety catches switched off (on one side only) as a go between.
Nimbus was another one of these "DOS Compatible" kinda-IBMish things that you could get a lot of stuff to work on. It must have had at least CGA compatibility because of all the DOS games that would work. It was the first machine I must have used Windows 2.0 on, but I barely touched Windows before 3.0.
I used some (pirated) software that included a bundled Windows 2 runtime on an Amstrad PC1512 with CGA (but enhanced to 16 colors in 640x200 to make GEM look good in the sales brochures) in the late 80s. The Windows app ran in mono 640x200.
never played with windows 2 but looks pretty awesome.
i think in this era the home market was largely saturated by home machines (atari st, amiga, apple 2+, a little macintosh). i don't remember a lot of pc juniors or other machines running windows 2, maybe some tandy machines but i think they were still more expensive than the home stuff.
For the record, a text-mode SuperWriter is the default word processor for the Apricot - but its format is not well understood by modern tools, unfortunately.
Superb. Excellent sleuthing and development, and well written-up too.
I supported a few Apricot machines in production in the late 1980s, and Sirius too, although I had forgotten the strange keyboard layout. It always was a better design than IBM's PC, or XT or AT come to that.
It had long seemed to me that if Apricot and the other non-PC-compatible DOS vendors had just been able to hang on in there until later in the Windows era than the fairly bad Windows 1 that they'd have suddenly had a much better chance. This work sort of serves as an existence proof: given Windows 2, an 8086-based Apricot is suddenly much more compatible with way more mainstream PC software than it was running DOS.
Apricot did survive, of course. The only SCO UNIX…
… a huge tower server on castors with a built-in UPS as well as 5.25" drive bays. Before we provisioned it with UNIX and deployed it at the customer's site, we put DOS and Castle Wolfenstein on it, and me and 2 colleagues played Wolftenstein while trundling it up and down a (very smooth) corridor. Its built-in UPS was beefy enough to drive a colour VGA monitor as well as the computer, so with the screen balanced on the system unit, 1 colleague rolled the server while another colleague rolled an office chair with the player sitting on it.
This machine showed Apricot again backing the wrong horse: it's the highest-end x86 IBM Microchannel machine I ever worked on.
… SCO Xenix was -- and for compatibility had to be -- built with MS C, not AT&T C. So every copy of every SCO OS meant SCO had to pay a lot of royalties.
I really enjoy the brief period just after the release of IBM PC, where manufacturers could see where things were heading, but were still trying different things to set themselves apart.
Sirius 1 had the weird floppy drive and unusal high-res graphics. Apricot had Display-in-keyboard and compact form factors. Olivetti had charming italian design and the strange upside-down motherboard (when battery leaks it drips down instead of eating the PCB, talk about ahead of its time!)
All ran MS-DOS but not "PC compatible", so none of them really took off. Then everyone started to do 100% compatible clones, and it was a race to the bottom.
> "Then everyone started to do 100% compatible clones, and it was a race to the bottom."
Maybe in the "who can make the cheapest clone" business. Because post-consolidation, plenty of outfits offered machines that set themselves apart. They had to.
I wouldn't even call it a "race" to the bottom. It took until maybe 1995 for prices to drop enough for some of the clone manufacturers to start going out of business. Radio Shack caught on around 1991 and got out early, but Zeos didn't go out of business until 1995 for instance.
Which is why nowadays vertical integration like everyone was doing back then is back.
As survivor of that era, Apple proved the point of higher margins, and the remaining OEMs want a piece of the pie, even better if it is ARM based instead of x86.
Is anyone doing vertical integration in the computer space besides Apple?
Most of the laptop vendors, with their pre-installed Windows, alongside OEMs differentiation customisations.
Android tablets with detachable keyboards.
Chromebooks as well.
The only PCs left with customisation are those aquariums full of rainbows, built by gamers.
In mainstream of course, then there all those little brands that only HN like audiences care that they exist.
The original Apricot was basically a luggable Sirius 1. ACT was the European distributor of the Sirius.
The Olivetti M24 was a PC compatible.
Windows 2 was an interesting moment in computing history.
Microsoft wasn't the dominant player and was sort of the underdog in many ways. Lotus was usually considered a more important company (Lotus 123 was huge) and WordStar dominated word processing.
The idea of the office suite hadn't taken off.
There were multiple competing GUI shells (GEM was popular and considered better than Windows).
Other non-PC, non-Mac computers were legitimate choices. Commodore, Atari, Tandy, Amstrad all had non-PC lines that sold really well.
One of my childhood computers was a Tandy 2000. This was a 186-based PC-incompatible computer available from Radio Shack. It was more performant than an AT, could access more base memory (due to a disk-based rather than ROM BIOS), and available at a lower price so it was a real contender before it was clear that the IBM standard would be used by everybody.
Not only could it run Windows 1.0, Microsoft used the Tandy 2000 internally for Windows development because in the early 1980s it was the only x86 machine out there that could do hi-res (640x400) color graphics. So, getting Windows 2.x backported to the 2000 is definitely feasible.
Hi, the article's author here~
I just checked the Tandy 2000 Windows pre-installation - it has the drivers unpacked, which means you can just get the Slow Boot Windows 2.0, and put the drivers from this floppy to it. And the fonts, of course. Definitely do not check this bad pirate website that has it: https://winworldpc.com/product/tandy-2000-ms-windows-pre-Ins...
> "[...] in the early 1980s it was the only x86 machine out there that could do hi-res (640x400) color graphics."
Mindset Mindset II.
Which was also a 186-based PC-incompatible.
Could the Mindset do 640x400 noninterlaced?
Neither Mindset nor Mindset II. Mindset II had the 640 x 400 four-color mode upgrade. Double-buffered but interlaced. Could be genlocked to another Mindset.
The Tandy 2000 could do 640x400 8-color noninterlaced. It was pretty useful as a CAD and DTP workstation, predating even the EGA by a year, which is why it was chosen to develop and test color Windows.
The Mindset machines were (also) advertised as Video Production System, with custom VLSI chips and modules for graphics and video workflows and assorted applications (e. g. Lumena). So a bit of a different market.
I wonder if there's some top-class Japanese x86 machines from the "IBM workalike" era.
Indeed. At the time, Tandy was trying to break into the business market with its computer offerings, and the 2000's software library reflects that, including MultiMate, Basic Four, Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony with hi-res graphic/charting add-ons, a version of Ashton-Tate's Framework, and the best desktop version of AutoCAD available at the time. The Mindset and Amiga lapped it in terms of video, audio, and in particular NTSC- and composite-compatible output capabilities, but machines that were targeting those workflows were doing something very different from the generic business market (which Windows, at the time, was aimed squarely at).
A composite compatible output addon, called the TV/Game Adapter, was planned but never released for the Tandy 2000; if released it might not have supported genlocking or really much beyond getting 16-color 320x200 or so video onto a TV. Until recently the only graphical game I recall actually being released for the machine was a special version of Flight Simulator; but recently on Facebook I saw a photo of a 2000 running some sort of video poker or other card game. It was unlikely to have been very fast paced and may even have been written in GW-BASIC; I don't know much about it.
PC-9801 could do 640×400 in 8 colors, and is supported by early Windows.
Amazing achievement.
I did some work for Apricot at their Glenrothes factory around 1985-87. In my memory they went heavier on GEM than Windows. I never saw an Apricot running Windows prior to the PC-compatible models.
They switched focus to Windows around 1988, I believe - it was around the same time they started using the MCA bus (I believe they ended up as most successful non-IBM MCA vendor), so perhaps they had been convinced by the hype around Windows being a sort of interim OS/2?
Whatever the reason, the Qi-386 (and its ISA-based derivative Xen-i) was often combined with the Deskside Environment Pack, consisting of a trackball, infrared smartcard reader, and Win/386.
My dad's small publishing company had a bunch of them, running Aldus PageMaker and FreeHand. Lovely machines, and about half the price of the equivalent Mac IIs!
That's what I've heard, too! But apparently there even was an effort to port Windows 2.11 to XEN, though I have no idea whether it was ever completed.
The initial Apricot model came with GSX, I don't think there was a GEM driver for the 800x400 screen.
There are two now; one from GEM 1.2 and one from FreeGEM.
I wish I'd been able to "acquire" one of the ACT Apricots that my dad's old work had. They were "portable" in the sense they had a handle very firmly attached, and I think the keyboard (which had a little strip of hotkeys with an LCD screen above - waaay ahead of you, Apple) clipped into the bottom of the unit.
The Apricot F1 was another cool one, about the size of a shoebox with a trackball rather than a mouse - when no-one else had any kind of pointing device!
Why are the Shift and Caps Lock keys shaped like that ? Is it because those wide keys cannot be pressed from the ends ?
I have no idea, but I do have a PC/AT keyboard with similarly-shaped keys. They have the usual "square horseshoe" / "anti-roll bar for Matchbox cars" arrangement underneath so they don't rock when you press the end.
I think it's just what they did in the 80s.
I believe you're right. From my limited memory of that period, it was a mechanical constraint.
Keycaps tended to be molded with a hollow cylinder or stalk on their base, which fitted through a snug round aperture on the keyboard base and pressed against a spring or other restraint. Pressing the key down against the spring actuated a pcb-mounted push-switch (or bridged a pair of adjacent connectors on the pcb) that provided the keypress signal. Pressing a wide key off-centre would cause the plastic stalk to bind against the enclosing aperture. Forcing the user to press direcly above the stalk mitigates this - hence the raised part of the keycap.
There is a stack exchange question about this at [1].
As to why the shift keys were wider to begin with, I'm not sure. Perhaps a consequence of the lack of the mechanical constraints that forced typewriter keyboards into a strict grid due to the interleaving of the lever arms. Some keyboards, notably the Commodore PET, didn't use wide shift keys [2] though.
It is worth noting that keyboards in that era were machine-specific, and often hard-wired to the main system box. Afaik standardisation and interoperability didn't happen until RS232 and, later, ps2 keyboards were introduced.
[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/16471/why...
[2] and let me just say here that the PET keyboard was truly awful, even by 80s standards. Just shamefully terrible.
The keyboard on the Apricot uses round capacitive foam pads under the keys. This means the keys had to be square, or they needed a mechanical thing like the space button on the photo here: https://www.baffo71.com/details.php?id_img=7
So, I think it is a mechanical/electrical limitation.
I don't know how many of these Apricot PCs I had as a kid. By the late eighties I was buying them for £1 a piece second hand as nobody wanted them (nobody could figure out why they didn't run PC software). I'd already had a couple of old Sirius 1 computers for a while, so I'd amassed a lot of "DOS compatible" programs that would work, and there was always the hope with every new PC you bought it would have some random new gem hidden on the HDD that you hadn't seen before.
The model I have is exactly like this, with a handle and a clip. You can still get one! :)
Yours is the later one with the hard disk, the ones that my dad had at work were beige with two floppies. They also had some Sirius 1s, one of which had a hard disk.
Probably all gone in the skip now, the factory is sitting closed and empty.
This linked article on Windows 2 is also excellent.
It also goes into the history of GUIs.
https://www.ninakalinina.com/notes/win2/
I seem to recall that I used Windows 2 on a RM Nimbus 80186 at school around 1984. It was for CAM.
Nowadays one of my customers has a sodding great machine that boots DOS 6. To get data files to and from it I use Samba with all the safety catches switched off (on one side only) as a go between.
Nimbus was another one of these "DOS Compatible" kinda-IBMish things that you could get a lot of stuff to work on. It must have had at least CGA compatibility because of all the DOS games that would work. It was the first machine I must have used Windows 2.0 on, but I barely touched Windows before 3.0.
RM Nimbus was an awesome line of machines from what I recall.
Totally underrated machines.
I used some (pirated) software that included a bundled Windows 2 runtime on an Amstrad PC1512 with CGA (but enhanced to 16 colors in 640x200 to make GEM look good in the sales brochures) in the late 80s. The Windows app ran in mono 640x200.
This unlocked some memories.
never played with windows 2 but looks pretty awesome.
i think in this era the home market was largely saturated by home machines (atari st, amiga, apple 2+, a little macintosh). i don't remember a lot of pc juniors or other machines running windows 2, maybe some tandy machines but i think they were still more expensive than the home stuff.
Congratulations! This should really breathe some new life into the Apricot, particularly now that you have a functioning word processor.
For the record, a text-mode SuperWriter is the default word processor for the Apricot - but its format is not well understood by modern tools, unfortunately.
> oscilloscope charts
Those are price charts for pork belly futures.
Oh no, you're right How do I unsee this
Nina is a ledge, you should follow on mastodon.
Superb. Excellent sleuthing and development, and well written-up too.
I supported a few Apricot machines in production in the late 1980s, and Sirius too, although I had forgotten the strange keyboard layout. It always was a better design than IBM's PC, or XT or AT come to that.
It had long seemed to me that if Apricot and the other non-PC-compatible DOS vendors had just been able to hang on in there until later in the Windows era than the fairly bad Windows 1 that they'd have suddenly had a much better chance. This work sort of serves as an existence proof: given Windows 2, an 8086-based Apricot is suddenly much more compatible with way more mainstream PC software than it was running DOS.
Apricot did survive, of course. The only SCO UNIX…
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/sco-unix-3-2-0f-limping-along/
… machine I ever installed was an Apricot VX/FT server…
https://ardent-tool.com/Apricot/vxft/
… a huge tower server on castors with a built-in UPS as well as 5.25" drive bays. Before we provisioned it with UNIX and deployed it at the customer's site, we put DOS and Castle Wolfenstein on it, and me and 2 colleagues played Wolftenstein while trundling it up and down a (very smooth) corridor. Its built-in UPS was beefy enough to drive a colour VGA monitor as well as the computer, so with the screen balanced on the system unit, 1 colleague rolled the server while another colleague rolled an office chair with the player sitting on it.
This machine showed Apricot again backing the wrong horse: it's the highest-end x86 IBM Microchannel machine I ever worked on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture
MCA was better than PC ISA or VL-bus and for some things better than EISA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Arc...
SCO UNIX was also arguably SCO backing the wrong horse too. I learned Unix on the older SCO Xenix:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
… which was smaller, simpler, and faster. SCO UNIX was more "official" but not better in any useful way.
However, Xenix had serious issues, some of which Charlie Stross recently documented in a comment on my blog:
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/97149.html#comments
… SCO Xenix was -- and for compatibility had to be -- built with MS C, not AT&T C. So every copy of every SCO OS meant SCO had to pay a lot of royalties.