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Apricot Portable (1984)
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Released in September 1983, the Apricot PC was Apricot Computers' first personal computer made for business use, and was based on an Intel 8086 microprocessor running at 4.77MHz. It had two 3.5" floppy drives and a keyboard with an LCD display, and achieved great success in the UK. Although it ran MS-DOS and CP/M, the PC was not compatible at a hardware level with the IBM PC, with an Intel 8089 I/O controller being used instead of the IBM 8237 DMA chip; the only ROM was a simple boot loader rather than a full BIOS, and there was no 640k barrier.
The graphics quality was critically acclaimed, with a 800 x 400 resolution and a keyboard with 8 "normal" and 6 flat programmable function keys along with a built-in LCD screen (40 characters / 2 lines) which displayed the function of the keys. Microsoft Word and Multiplan were supplied with the PC.
The Apricot Xi was a similar computer, but with a hard drive instead of the second floppy.
Resources
Apricot Computers
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