[zabzonk]

For those of you that might be interested, the Rainbow was an attempt by DEC to make an IBM-compatible AND a CP/M compatible in one box - it was a very nice box, and made a great VT200 terminal, but the compatibility was just not there.

The Apricot was another attempt at an IBM PC compatible, this time from a UK company. It was awful. You could not fit an Ethernet card into it without using an expansion box, much like the RAM pack on a Sinclair ZX81, and with similar reliability.

[rjsw]

The Apricot PC [1] was not an IBM PC compatible, it was a Victor 9000/Sirius 1 compatible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC

[jhbadger]

Yes, it was one of those MS-DOS machines that wasn't a full IBM compatible -- another one briefly popular in the US and Japan was the Sanyo MBC-550 (or "Silver Box"). The idea was that people would write software that just used the MS-DOS API (the way they did for CP/M machines). But unfortunately they didn't -- most software assumed that it was running on an IBM PC so machines that didn't convincingly appear to be IBM PCs failed.

[zabzonk]

We (at the BBC) had the later 286 versions which claimed compatibility, and could run Windows 2.0 - they were still crap, and in fact so unreliable that we trashed them all and replaced them with Compaq, as doing so was so much cheaper in support, development and other costs.

Original reason for buying them was of course because they were "British". This was in the late 1980s - luckily things have changed since.

[rjsw]

If Douglas Adams owned the Apricot before the Macintosh then it would have been an 8086+8089 one, they were reliable. His writing suggested that he only used Macs after getting the first one.