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by bboreham 168 days ago
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.

3 comments

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.