Apricot Xen - Great Ideas Come Back to the PC

[@vwestlife]

The same monitor design was also sold by Zenith. You could get it with green or amber phosphor, and a composite or MDA/Hercules input.

[@CelGenStudios]

I love how the plastics were supposedly injection cast by Borg Warner. Their name is hidden around the larger plastic components.

[@vwestlife]

@@CelGenStudios Yup, I did a teardown of a Zenith monitor that was unfortunately damaged in shipping, and I saw that inside. Mine has a Philips picture tube.

[@jamesdecross1035]

You're absolutely right. There is almost no-one talking about Apricot computers on mainstream social media, and yet they look like they were great machines. I certainly enjoy my PC and Xi, today.

[@CelGenStudios]

They just disappeared. God only knows what other companies met the same fate.

[@BLADIEBLA-k3k]

I thoroughly enjoyed this series, thank you!

[@pauledwards2817]

The UK was about three years behind the US in adoption of PC systems. They were too expensive for the UK market, including clones so it did not go from Apple II and so on direct to PC. Things like the Amstrad PCW ended up in a lot of small businesses for a bit of word processing and maybe a few other things. This also meant the that at the home end the likes of Amiga and ST go in for a couple of years so folks did not have a PC at home even when Amstrad changed the market with the PC1512 but from then on people started to think of a PC at home too which made them less intimidating for folks in the workplace. A lot of people went and bought Amstrad PCWs for home too.

[@bikeforever2016]

Great series filling in some history of my local computer manufacturing. Thanks, much enjoyed.

[@leodf1]

You totally look like a computer geek out of an 80's movie. Your studio too. Love it

[@TommyCrosby]

That keyboard mini screen is Apple Touch Bar granddaddy!

[@Jabjabs]

For a computer company I had never really heard much of only a few months back - they were pretty dang awesome with the ambition. Alas, the 80's and 90's was the venture capital phase of trying a million different ideas and then finding out which one will be able to survive by both quality and pure luck.

[@datassetteuser356]

A jumpscare in a vintage comuter video? that was unexpected 😅. Cheers, enjoy your content very much. Makes me interested in the history of Apricot.

[@computeraidedworld1148]

This was a great series. Keep up the good work!

[@roysainsbury4556]

we had a Zen-i at work. No LCD screen on the keyboard etc. Oddly though, it had a monochrome monitor, but it acted like it was a colour monitor, as it would display shades of grey if you went it colour! I had a program to change the shape of the DOS cursor, or even turn it off, which worked OK on all our other machines, but malfunctioned on the Zen. No idea if it supported Hercules graphics as it spend it's life running WordStar 5. This machine had a power-out for the monitor. One day, someone tried to plug a large colour monitor into it, and bang! A guess a fuse was blown in the PSU when faced with the much larger current requirements of a larger monitor. No-one could figure out how to fix it, so it was junked. Sad, really.

[@slightlyevolved]

I stumbled on this channel last month. Just a few days ago I watched the video from about 4yrs ago when you factory restored an Apricot Xen.... Talk about timing here.

[@Tombowolf]

What a blast. Somehow these machines carry many similarities to what Siemens did at that time with the PC-D, PC-X, PC-MX,... Series. Same time, similar odd system designs, CP/M first, MS-DOS compatible but (mostly) not IBM or ran their own UNIX variant called Sinix.

[@Arivia1]

ooh! love the expo 86 shirt!

[@Arivia1]

This was a great series! Thank you, I'd never heard of Apricot before you started sharing these and now I know the whole moribund story!

[@charlesdorval394]

The server version of this with Xenix uh ... Interesting! :) Thanks for showing them up, I never heard of these before

[@trekintosh]

The MicroScreen seems intensely useful, especially the calculate then send to computer feature.

[@CelGenStudios]

And it's fully programmable through a DOS TSR so you can make it do almost anything you want and integrate with any programs you write.

[@trekintosh]

@ even more fabulous! I want one for my modern PC.

[@joseoncrack]

Apricot did make a number of pretty cool stuff. Technology has evolved immensely since then, but I'm afraid the excitement that must have been to design, and discover those machines at the time, is completely gone and we're pretty unlikely to experience that again in a long time now.

[@JesterEric]

I can remember watching a BBC TV programme about Apricot during a University course. It was called Troubleshooter(1990). A well known and very opinionated businessman Sir John Harvey Jones visited struggling companies like Apricot. I think he told them to sell the company. Cant find that episode to watch but may be available somewhere

[@someusername1]

Yes, I remember that. His advice was ruthless and usually sane and sensible. It is sad when, no matter what you do or how cool you are, your products just aren't going to sell. (Unless you had Steve Jobs' personality to make magic).

[@CelGenStudios]

Yeah that would be cool to find!

[@cromulence]

I've been really enjoying this series - my brother would pick up scrap PCs from the local town dump years ago - I remember him mentioning an Apricot machine when I was very young - never ever saw said machine, but my understanding is that he never got far with it due to a lack of software. Anyhow, it's been awesome seeing different Apricot systems. I have an Amstrad PPC640 that is in need of some TLC - never got around to doing so myself. I'm in the UK but if you can cover shipping, you're welcome to it! It has 2x720K 3.5" drives and a 2400bps(?) modem built in. Let me know if you want it!

[@CelGenStudios]

I appreciate the offer for the Amstrad however I actually already own a PPC640! It's a little rough for wear but I received it in 2008 and never got around to talking about it.

[@cromulence]

@@CelGenStudios Awesome! Perhaps one day I'll find the time to resurrect mine.

[@CelGenStudios]

@@cromulence It's a really neat system for how the keyboard folds down and the LCD screen swings up.

[@bollux78]

Imagine that xv9800 server with 30 386+387 processors!

[@CelGenStudios]

Those pre-SMP specification multiprocessing x86 machines were all absolutely wild systems.

[@Rlea67]

I used 2 Xen’s in1984 for a number of years to produce shipping data using Supercalc spreadsheet, they replaced the Xi id previously used. It was clear then that although apricot did have a lot of software available to it the whole ‘pc’ compatibility thing was becoming a big thing within the UK, by 1986 we’d replaced both Apricots with PC compatible devices. The design of the apricots was amazing tho, sad that the company effectively chose the wrong path

[@TheWiseTent]

After watching your videos (I'm a newer subscriber) I wonder what Apricot would have been doing today if they had stayed alive. I bet they'd be making some really cool stuff in 2025!!

[@TheDiveO]

They would fall over and die over and over again: they couldn't become the computer swarovski for kreatifs because Apple eventually occupied that niche and otherwise PCs were extensible with a mass market of 3rd party stuff, something apricot had to avoid in order to survive, which it can't because of their too niche design.

[@iCQ_www.SPCL.tk_]

thank for sharing sir! +1 sub here from holland!

[@madcommodore]

I don't think so. 1985 Kickstart multitasking OS Kernal absolutely reamed every OS below UNIX on workstations. Which is why it is inside OS/2 2.1 onward

[@koenlefever]

Ah, I remember the time when British companies named their machines after computers from BBC's "Blakes 7" television series: Xen (Zen) and Oric (Orac).

[@benotsilent6703]

Please, if anyone knows, are there modern versions of that keyboard with the same calculator and screen functionality?

[@CelGenStudios]

Logitech G15 or Logitech G19? The idea of a programmable LCD screen on your keyboard has been tried somewhat recently but it never really gained popularity.

[@benotsilent6703]

@@CelGenStudios that's unfortunate. I appreciate the reply.

[@probablyanadult7354]

Oh there goes my pc

[@SteepSix]

Hey, are you Solo on Silo?

[@dr.elvis.h.christ]

No,, 8" floppies were not the norm in 1980. 5.25" was already the most common.

[@IkarusKommt]

Oh, that '80 cost-cutting "PCBs in a plastic sandwich" design.

[@idahofur]

Yea, the big old IBM clone thing killed off tons of unique computers. More bang for your buck hardware and even software wise. Did not matter. Then it seems like all within 5 years. The back of computer magazines was having ads with closeout systems for pennies on the dollar. As for software later on around 1992. Yea, that seemed to be common. More on windows systems than dos. Sure the hardware was cheaper. But, I saw some very, very poorly written programs that ran great on say IBM Aix systems.Update: Found one place said one of the problems is systems froze often. (windows 3.0) ouch.

[@WhatALoadOfTosca]

"The life and death of Ap"... stopped watching.

[@CelGenStudios]

:'(