Apricot PC

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Apricot PC was Apricot Computers' first personal computer made for business use. The press received it well, especially for the high resolution 800 x 400 of its time and its trackball cable (future models will be IR). It is the first non-Japanese computer using 3.5 Sony floppy disc units. It uses a Intel 8086 processor running at 4,77 MHz. Optional 8087 math co-processor were possible. Memory is 256 kB expandable to 768 kB. CRT green-screen 9 with text mode 80 x 25 or graphics 800 x 400 pixels. Equipped with two floppy discs and a keyboard with an integrated LCD display. Released in 1983, it achieved success in the UK. The manufacturer failed completely to clone the IBM BIOS, so although it ran MS-DOS and CP/M-86, it was not IBM PC compatible as the underlying system BIOS and hardware is very different. An Intel 8089 I/O controller was used, instead of the Intel 8237 DMA chip used in IBM computers; the ROM was only a simple boot loader rather than a full BIOS; and there was no 640k barrier. The floppy disk format was not quite compatible; attempting to read an ordinary PC floppy in an Apricot, or vice versa, would result in a scrambled directory listing with some files missing.