I really enjoy the brief period just after the release of IBM PC, where manufacturers could see where things were heading, but were still trying different things to set themselves apart.
Sirius 1 had the weird floppy drive and unusal high-res graphics. Apricot had Display-in-keyboard and compact form factors. Olivetti had charming italian design and the strange upside-down motherboard (when battery leaks it drips down instead of eating the PCB, talk about ahead of its time!)
All ran MS-DOS but not "PC compatible", so none of them really took off. Then everyone started to do 100% compatible clones, and it was a race to the bottom.
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.
I wish I'd been able to "acquire" one of the ACT Apricots that my dad's old work had. They were "portable" in the sense they had a handle very firmly attached, and I think the keyboard (which had a little strip of hotkeys with an LCD screen above - waaay ahead of you, Apple) clipped into the bottom of the unit.
The Apricot F1 was another cool one, about the size of a shoebox with a trackball rather than a mouse - when no-one else had any kind of pointing device!
I have no idea, but I do have a PC/AT keyboard with similarly-shaped keys. They have the usual "square horseshoe" / "anti-roll bar for Matchbox cars" arrangement underneath so they don't rock when you press the end.
Yours is the later one with the hard disk, the ones that my dad had at work were beige with two floppies. They also had some Sirius 1s, one of which had a hard disk.
Probably all gone in the skip now, the factory is sitting closed and empty.
I used some (pirated) software that included a bundled Windows 2 runtime on an Amstrad PC1512 with CGA (but enhanced to 16 colors in 640x200 to make GEM look good in the sales brochures) in the late 80s. The Windows app ran in mono 640x200.
One of my childhood computers was a Tandy 2000. This was a 186-based PC-incompatible computer available from Radio Shack. It was more performant than an AT, could access more base memory (due to a disk-based rather than ROM BIOS), and available at a lower price so it was a real contender before it was clear that the IBM standard would be used by everybody.
Not only could it run Windows 1.0, Microsoft used the Tandy 2000 internally for Windows development because in the early 1980s it was the only x86 machine out there that could do hi-res (640x400) color graphics. So, getting Windows 2.x backported to the 2000 is definitely feasible.
I just checked the Tandy 2000 Windows pre-installation - it has the drivers unpacked, which means you can just get the Slow Boot Windows 2.0, and put the drivers from this floppy to it. And the fonts, of course. Definitely do not check this bad pirate website that has it: https://winworldpc.com/product/tandy-2000-ms-windows-pre-Ins...
Sirius 1 had the weird floppy drive and unusal high-res graphics. Apricot had Display-in-keyboard and compact form factors. Olivetti had charming italian design and the strange upside-down motherboard (when battery leaks it drips down instead of eating the PCB, talk about ahead of its time!)
All ran MS-DOS but not "PC compatible", so none of them really took off. Then everyone started to do 100% compatible clones, and it was a race to the bottom.
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.
The Apricot F1 was another cool one, about the size of a shoebox with a trackball rather than a mouse - when no-one else had any kind of pointing device!
I think it's just what they did in the 80s.
Probably all gone in the skip now, the factory is sitting closed and empty.
This unlocked some memories.
Not only could it run Windows 1.0, Microsoft used the Tandy 2000 internally for Windows development because in the early 1980s it was the only x86 machine out there that could do hi-res (640x400) color graphics. So, getting Windows 2.x backported to the 2000 is definitely feasible.
I just checked the Tandy 2000 Windows pre-installation - it has the drivers unpacked, which means you can just get the Slow Boot Windows 2.0, and put the drivers from this floppy to it. And the fonts, of course. Definitely do not check this bad pirate website that has it: https://winworldpc.com/product/tandy-2000-ms-windows-pre-Ins...