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.

The first company I worked for was 'Orchard Computers', because they sold Apple, Acorn and Apricot.

Around 1993-4

Elonex were another UK-based PC brand that manufactured their own 386/486 boards for their systems in the early 90s.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No not really. They were pants. :)

Today I recommend Star Labs, another underrated brand that ships machines with coreboot.

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Erm, that page just gives me activitystream json?