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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

>I read somewhere that Douglas Adams (writer of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) was the first person in Europe to own an Apple II computer.

Not the 1977 Apple II, but the 1984 Macintosh. Adams owned a variety of computers from the obscure DEC Rainbow, to the also-obscure Apricot, to the BBC Micro, but as far as I know he never owned an Apple II, but he was a fan of the Macintosh from the first time he saw it and even wrote in the "about the author" section of his books that he "lived with a lady barrister and an Apple Macintosh".

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Stephen Fry is one source of the story.

> I like to claim that I bought the second Macintosh computer ever sold in Europe in that January, 30 years ago. My friend and hero Douglas Adams was in the queue ahead of me. For all I know someone somewhere had bought one ten minutes earlier, but these were the first two that the only shop selling them in London had in stock on the 24th January 1984, so I’m sticking to my story.

1. https://www.stephenfry.com/2014/01/mac-at-30/

For those of you that might be interested, the Rainbow was an attempt by DEC to make an IBM-compatible AND a CP/M compatible in one box - it was a very nice box, and made a great VT200 terminal, but the compatibility was just not there.

The Apricot was another attempt at an IBM PC compatible, this time from a UK company. It was awful. You could not fit an Ethernet card into it without using an expansion box, much like the RAM pack on a Sinclair ZX81, and with similar reliability.

The Apricot PC [1] was not an IBM PC compatible, it was a Victor 9000/Sirius 1 compatible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC

Yes, it was one of those MS-DOS machines that wasn't a full IBM compatible -- another one briefly popular in the US and Japan was the Sanyo MBC-550 (or "Silver Box"). The idea was that people would write software that just used the MS-DOS API (the way they did for CP/M machines). But unfortunately they didn't -- most software assumed that it was running on an IBM PC so machines that didn't convincingly appear to be IBM PCs failed.

We (at the BBC) had the later 286 versions which claimed compatibility, and could run Windows 2.0 - they were still crap, and in fact so unreliable that we trashed them all and replaced them with Compaq, as doing so was so much cheaper in support, development and other costs.

Original reason for buying them was of course because they were "British". This was in the late 1980s - luckily things have changed since.

If Douglas Adams owned the Apricot before the Macintosh then it would have been an 8086+8089 one, they were reliable. His writing suggested that he only used Macs after getting the first one.

"The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors." -- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, 1987

The Macintosh Plus was introduced in January 1986.

IIRC, he wrote some of his books on a PowerBook.

And it's been 30 years since I read them, but I think I recall lots of mentions of Macintosh (IIs in particular, I think?) in the Dirk Gently series.

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