used to sell the Apricots back in the days. The PCs from Apricot and Grid stood out in terms of design, from the rest of beige uglies.
le-mark•Jul 3, 2026
Were they actually available to purchase? Seems like supply of these and others was usually a bit spotty.
jnaina•Jul 3, 2026
Yes, I had the Apricot Xen in the shop. If I remember correctly, they were not 100% PC compatible, and did not exactly sell well. Neither did the Grids. But both were great conversation starters.
Scramblejams•Jul 3, 2026
The Grid Compass series (especially the II models with the big screen) looked like it came from the future. Stunning in its era. Wouldn't mind seeing a reboot.
jnaina•Jul 3, 2026
Yes, they were stunning. looked like a prop from bladerunner.
spants•Jul 3, 2026
me too! In the pc business from 1981!, Apricots were great bits of kit. The GRIDs were good but very expensive at the time.
Perenti•Jul 3, 2026
I recall announcements in 1984 that Apricot were building a m68k machine. I was very excited at the time. I never heard if it ever really happened though.
qingcharles•Jul 3, 2026
The ACT Sirius 1 (Victor 9000) was amazing for its time.
The other Apricot PCs were great, but so many of their machines were sidelined because they were only DOS-compatible and not generally IBM PC-compatible, and so could only run certain software.
awesomeusername•Jul 3, 2026
The first company I worked for was 'Orchard Computers', because they sold Apple, Acorn and Apricot.
Around 1993-4
spiffx•Jul 3, 2026
Used them at my Dad's PCB manufacturing business in South Wales for standard accounts and payroll, then went on to develop production control software for the company with my cousin: still have a pile of 3.5" floppies with Pascal code on them somewhere. Happy days!
At one time we actually ended up manufacturing PCBs to go into various Apricot machines: I vaguely recall the odd little LCD display ("microscreen") on some of the keyboards: did it have printed carbon pads for the membrane keyboard?
As far as we were concerned, they were great machines.
axisofdenial•Jul 6, 2026
One of my first roles in the early 90s was on a UK government project.
They used Apricot desktops, talking to IBM mainframes running COBOL. The desktops ran OS2.
The project also had Unix machines made by British Telecom and Apple Macs for word processing.
Looking back, it’s amazing how diverse the computing environment was.
pixelesque•Jul 6, 2026
Elonex were another UK-based PC brand that manufactured their own 386/486 boards for their systems in the early 90s.
mixmastamyk•Jul 6, 2026
Today I recommend Star Labs, another underrated brand that ships machines with coreboot.
10 Comments
The other Apricot PCs were great, but so many of their machines were sidelined because they were only DOS-compatible and not generally IBM PC-compatible, and so could only run certain software.
Around 1993-4
At one time we actually ended up manufacturing PCBs to go into various Apricot machines: I vaguely recall the odd little LCD display ("microscreen") on some of the keyboards: did it have printed carbon pads for the membrane keyboard?
As far as we were concerned, they were great machines.
They used Apricot desktops, talking to IBM mainframes running COBOL. The desktops ran OS2.
The project also had Unix machines made by British Telecom and Apple Macs for word processing.
Looking back, it’s amazing how diverse the computing environment was.