Apricot Computers

» see apricot.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The Apricot PC went on sale in September 1983, about a year before I was born. Everything here is secondhand: a British business machine built for British offices, in a market that had no Turkish end to it at all.

The company behind it was older than the hardware by eighteen years. Applied Computer Techniques was incorporated in Birmingham on 5 April 1965 and spent its first decade as a time-sharing bureau, selling hours on machines its customers could not afford to own, before it moved into office equipment and leased minicomputers. In 1982 it struck a deal to sell the Victor 9000 in Britain and Europe as the ACT Sirius 1, and that rebadged American machine became the most popular 16-bit business computer in Europe while IBM was still deciding when to ship the PC there.

The Apricot PC followed in September 1983 and it was ACT's own design: an 8086 running at 4.77 MHz, with two of the new 3.5 inch floppy drives at a time when 5.25 inch disks were still the standard. It ran MS-DOS or CP/M-86 and had no hardware compatibility with the IBM PC whatsoever. Microsoft Word and Multiplan came in the box.

~ the record ~

~ the microscreen ~

The thing people remember is the keyboard. Alongside eight ordinary function keys sat six touch-sensitive ones, and above them a two-line LCD called the Microscreen that told you what those six keys currently did. It could also work as a calculator and push the answer straight into the command line, and it kept working as a calculator with the computer switched off. Apricot shipped a complete all-in-one with a 3.5 inch drive before Apple did, which is the sort of fact a company that is doing well mentions and a company that is dying puts on the brochure.

~ glenrothes ~

The hardware was built in Fife, at a factory in Glenrothes, and the engineering kept being genuinely ahead. In 1989 Byte put the Apricot VX FT on its cover as the world's first machine built around Intel's 80486: a fault-tolerant file server designed by Bob Cross, with its own uninterruptible power supply built in. In the early 1990s the company made one of the most secure x86 PCs in the world for the UK government, sold to nobody else.

Apricot could design and manufacture nearly every part of a computer except the chips. By the mid-1990s that was the wrong skill to have. Compaq and Hewlett-Packard were buying motherboards from Taiwanese design houses at a third of what it cost Apricot to design in Birmingham and build in Scotland, and the market had stopped paying for clever. There is one famous black mark too: Apricot was the largest partner in the consortium that built the London Ambulance Service dispatch system, which collapsed on its first day in full operation. The later inquiry found no major problem with the Apricot hardware and plenty with everything around it.

~ what the register says ~

Mitsubishi Electric bought the computer manufacturing business in April 1990, hoping a British brand would help it fight NEC at home. The distinctive design stopped almost immediately and the later machines are ordinary. Glenrothes stopped production in June 1999 and the European operation was closed that October, with the assets sold off.

Companies House tells a stranger version of the same story. Number 00844354, incorporated on 5 April 1965, was called APRICOT COMPUTERS P.L.C. only between 13 August 1985 and 30 May 1990, which is to say it dropped the name within weeks of selling the hardware. That entity went on living inside Misys as MISYS B & S DIVISION LIMITED and was not dissolved until 1 July 2014. The brand died in Scotland in 1999. The legal person that had carried it went on filing accounts until 2013 and was not struck off until the year after that.

~ the second apricot ~

A new APRICOT COMPUTERS LTD was incorporated on 4 April 2008 by people with no connection to Birmingham, and in October that year it shipped a netbook called the Picobook Pro. The reviews were poor. Companies House dissolved it on 8 May 2012. A third company registered the name in Bodmin in March 2022 and files dormant accounts under SIC code 99999, so somebody owns the word and is not using it. apricot.co.uk redirects to a domain broker's for-sale page.

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