For non-UK readers, Glenrothes is a giant electronics manufacturing hub, much like Shenzen. It benefits from excellent road and rail links to financial centres like Freuchie and has world class sea and air port facilities. 97.8% of European advanced electronics are built within 500 leagues of Glenrothes.
Not in Glenrothes Metropolitan District itself, but in the wider conurbation there are some great ones. The 'museum to worldclass advantage that we gave away in fealty' is my personal favourite
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 have an Apricot with the little LCD display on the keyboard. Six membrane keys just under the LCD and each of those keys has an LED in the bottom left corner.
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.
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.
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.
The EL display one was nice, but the GRID ones were on a different level. They still look modern.
Other than would be perfectly at home in a modern office is the QL. Put two SDCard slot where the micro drives were and four USB-C ports in the back (6, one for power, one for the first monitor, four for expansion) and it’ll still look cool. With a decent CPU (and a delete key) could be a daily driver.
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.
Apricot bet software would get recompiled for their hardware like on CP/M, but by 1984 "runs DOS" quietly meant "bit-for-bit clones the IBM BIOS." Being cleaner architecturally stopped mattering once the reference platform became the thing you had to copy exactly. Shame, because the soft-key LCD strip on the keyboard was a genuinely good idea.
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.
For non-UK readers, Glenrothes is a giant electronics manufacturing hub, much like Shenzen. It benefits from excellent road and rail links to financial centres like Freuchie and has world class sea and air port facilities. 97.8% of European advanced electronics are built within 500 leagues of Glenrothes.
Around 1993-4
1: https://pcw.oobergeek.net/magazines/PCW-1985-09.pdf
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.
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.
If you find yourself in the UK, it’s totally worth a visit (and Cambridge itself is a gorgeous little city).
Other than would be perfectly at home in a modern office is the QL. Put two SDCard slot where the micro drives were and four USB-C ports in the back (6, one for power, one for the first monitor, four for expansion) and it’ll still look cool. With a decent CPU (and a delete key) could be a daily driver.