The other fruit company, Apricot | Hacker News Reader

The other fruit company, Apricot

abortretry.fail

54 pointsBirAdam24 comments

First computer I ever used -- working for the Civil Service (UK government admin job), it sat lonely in the corner of the room. I read the documentation and discovered that it had what was called a "spreadsheet", wild, that was one of my jobs, to tabulate and add-up metrics from various sections on a big bit of paper. I typed in all of the numbers and it all worked, so I printed the results and handed to my boss. She was not impressed so made me add up all of the numbers by hand "the usual way" to check that the machine actually worked.

Here suspicions were not unreasonable, to be fair[0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spr...

One other problem not mentioned is that biologists have to name genes in a way that they won't be autocorrected or reformatted by Excel, especially those that Excel thinks are supposed to be dates [0]

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-17104-3

Or they could just learn to use Excel and prefix text with an apostrophe.

True enough, though in that case the machine did agree with the additions done in the proper manner.

Started in the Civil Service in 1989 as the lowliest of the low. My first experience of a spreadsheet was some software called 20/20 (by Access Technology?) which not only allowed me to play with numbers in various ways but also gave me macros which could be accessed via user-defined buttons/menus inserted into the spreadsheet itself. The software may have been on a computer accessed with a terminal/screen, because I remember when our office got our first desktop Apricots I'm pretty sure they came with Lotus123. Desktop PCs were rare until the new financial year came round and enough budget was found to give us all our own Apricot. A few years later they all got replaced by Dell PCs, by which time I had to go down to the smoking room for my cigarette break because the bosses also banned smoking-at-your-desk.

One of my jobs was to check expense claims. I had to do that job using a huge brick of a calculator which dated from at least the mid 70s. Strange how that machine outlasted all the Apricots ...

I have a small connection to an early part of this story.

In 1982/3 I worked for a local data processing / software consultancy / hardware reseller doing a variety of odd jobs. One day the owner came in and said they were going to become a reseller of a new computer, a Victor Technologies machine, as computers and terminals on IBM System 3X machines via Perle protocol converters. I remapped the keyboard of the Victor to allow the right shift to serve as a 5251 Enter key.

Victor had rented space in a new office tower and held a grand opening a couple of weeks later. I demonstrated our wares. There wasn’t that much interest, so I wandered around all of the display booths, learned what they were demoing, and in some cases took over. I remember 3 distinct features: 1) variable speed disk drives, which meant the Victor could store more data than am IBM PC. 2) a built-in codec for recording sound, especially speech, and aiding playback. 3) a stylus/touch-screen monitor option, which could be used for CAD etc.

I had an option to buy a machine for half price. I was an Apple IIe guy at the time and couldn’t have afforded it anyway, but it was a sweet machine. Sadly, that didn’t matter much, and Victor went out of business soon enough.

The Victor 9000 (aka Sirius 1) was an absolutely fantastic PC, ahead of its time and killed off by (mostly) lack of IBM compatibility.

IBM pioneered the “embrace, extend and extinguish” approach to using their monopoly in mainframes to kill off competition in PCs. Intel and Microsoft then took over as monopolists after the consent decree restricted IBM. These were then restricted by the US government as well: AMD was founded with assistance from the US military to allow Intel chips to meet dual-source requirements, and the federal settlement with Microsoft saved Apple from oblivion.

Our current generation of monopolists - Google, Meta, Oracle, Amazon, and still Apple - will they likewise be taken down by government anti-monopoly efforts or allowed to continue indefinitely like major banks? We shall see.

this brings back memories, albeit bad ones. the department i worked for it the BBC in the late 80s standardised on apricots (because "british") and they were terrible. they had such a low profile case that you couldn't fit a network card in - instead it had to go in a side bus-extension box, which was about as reliable as a zx81 ram pack. and the rest of the hardware was crap too. we eventually decided that the money we were spending on maintenance was just too much, and reqplaced them all with compaqs.

This being a late '80s, how unfortunate that they did not decide to settle on the other British computer platform starting with A and referring to a kind of fruit

presumably you mean acorn? hardly a business machine, and with very limited network connectivity, which we required for our unix boxes and ICL mainframe. i remember when the (acorn) BBC Micro came out having a quiet laugh about how poor it was compared to CP/M boxes i was used to using at the time.

Well yes, but again this being the late 80s I was thinking not BBC micro but Archimedes or even the Cambridge Workstation, both of which were considerably more powerful than anything else available on the market at the time (in the comparable price segment) even if they were not directly marketed to business.

The Cambridge was available in xenix form IIRC, and by the time the a5000 came along in I think 90 or 91 acorns platform was fully matured onto ARM architecture by then, although I admit few would have foreseen just how significant an advantage that could have been at the time.

oh, but the archimedes were so expensive, and once again didn't have the connectivity.

Acorn did have a couple of unix/xenix boxes, but not arm based as far as i can remember (could be wrong). i can't believe they sold more than a dozen or so of the things, generally to act as file servers for the BBC Micro's weird networking (forgotten what it was called).

The Acorn machines in 1985 actually did run CP/M business software if you added a Z80 or 68000 second procoessor. The CP/M variant was called CPN but it supported a compatible set of commands and system calls. It was the machine I grew up with, and I ran dBase II and Wordstar on it among other things - "real" business software.

Wordstar was good for editing BBC BASIC code, with its inline Z80 assembler... which could communicate with the other BBC BASIC code with its inline 6502 assembler on the same machine. Multiple cores in 1985 :)

> In 1990, Apricot was the 2nd largest PC manufacturer in the UK.

...

> Apricot sold to Mitsubishi for $70 million (about $163 million in 2023).

After all that, less than $200m in today's dollars. Hardware is hard!

Technically acorns are fruit too.

not to mention tangerines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_Computer_Systems

I can't believe! In one product, so original (good) aesthetic, and so obvious design mistakes, definitely lead to fail.

The F1, then the xen were beautiful PCs in an era of ugly designs. Not particularly compatible, but beautiful.

After twenty years the founders made out with tens of millions, for a company that was ultimately entirely worthless, and whose employees were all laid off. Perhaps some of the former factory workers ended up on the dole. Capitalism in a nutshell.

It was owned by Mitsubushi for 9yrs, that they couldn’t do something with the company in that time is hardly the fault of the founders who sold it to them

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