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Apricot PC

After having imported the Victor Sirius for years in the UK, ACT produced its own computer largely inspired by the Sirius : the Apricot PC.

It was supposed to be transportable as there is a handle on the main-unit ! If you really want to move your Apricot this way, the keyboard can be clipped to the main-unit.

Several features made this computer quite technically innovative :
• the Apricot PC was possibly the first computer outside Japan to use 3.5'' disk-drives (315k or 720k),
• the graphics quality and features were excellent (800 x 400) and came directly from the Victor Sirius,
• the keyboard was quite original with 8 "normal" and 6 flat programmable function keys along with a built-in LCD screen (40 characters / 2 lines) which displayed the function of the keys. This feature was largely used by the included software, but not much by third-party software.

This small LCD screen could also display the current line of text you're working on and there's even a contrast knob on the right of the keyboard.

It's possible to transfer files and some software from a Sirius or an IBM PC to the Apricot PC by connecting them with a special cable. There's also an IBM PC emulator which forces the Apricot to act like an IBM PC. It works well for some applications but not all.

Some software was supplied with the Apricot PC : Supercalc, various system tools, asynchronous communication, IBM-PC emulator, Microsoft Basic-86, Basic Personal and ACT Manager (a graphical interface for MS-DOS). Word, Multiplan, Wordstar, dBase II, C-Pascal, Pascal UCSD, C, Fortran, Cobol and Basic Compiler 5.35 were available optionally.

In 1984, ACT launched new versions of the Apricot PC with built-in hard-disks and a different colour case. They were called Apricot Xi.

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About IBM/PC compatibility, Greg Taylor specifies:
Concerning the early Apricot PCs (including the Xi) the reason they could not run all MS-DOS programs is that while they came with a copy of MS-DOS, they did not have an identical BIOS so any calls to specific BIOS modules could often fail.
For example, dBase III could not run (on mine anyway) but a competitor product called (I think) DBXL did run. That apart, they were very nice computers for their time with 3.5" disks (nearly everyone else was still using 5.25") and high-quality graphics.

Ian Foggon reports:
The original Apricot PC also came in another flavour you have not listed. It was possible to have these units upgraded to 286 IBM compatible standard by Apricot UK. This involved the replacement of the motherboard and the addition of a 20Mb Miniscribe HDD in the place of one of the Sony 3.5” FDDs. My Father had this done to his Apricot PC back in 1988. These units had their own specially written manuals, and the keyboards were re-keyed to make them IBM compatible too.