I really enjoy the brief period just after the release of IBM PC, where manufacturers could see where things were heading, but were still trying different things to set themselves apart.

Sirius 1 had the weird floppy drive and unusal high-res graphics. Apricot had Display-in-keyboard and compact form factors. Olivetti had charming italian design and the strange upside-down motherboard (when battery leaks it drips down instead of eating the PCB, talk about ahead of its time!)

All ran MS-DOS but not "PC compatible", so none of them really took off. Then everyone started to do 100% compatible clones, and it was a race to the bottom.

Windows 2 was an interesting moment in computing history.

Microsoft wasn't the dominant player and was sort of the underdog in many ways. Lotus was usually considered a more important company (Lotus 123 was huge) and WordStar dominated word processing.

The idea of the office suite hadn't taken off.

There were multiple competing GUI shells (GEM was popular and considered better than Windows).

Other non-PC, non-Mac computers were legitimate choices. Commodore, Atari, Tandy, Amstrad all had non-PC lines that sold really well.

One of my childhood computers was a Tandy 2000. This was a 186-based PC-incompatible computer available from Radio Shack. It was more performant than an AT, could access more base memory (due to a disk-based rather than ROM BIOS), and available at a lower price so it was a real contender before it was clear that the IBM standard would be used by everybody.

Not only could it run Windows 1.0, Microsoft used the Tandy 2000 internally for Windows development because in the early 1980s it was the only x86 machine out there that could do hi-res (640x400) color graphics. So, getting Windows 2.x backported to the 2000 is definitely feasible.

Amazing achievement.

I did some work for Apricot at their Glenrothes factory around 1985-87. In my memory they went heavier on GEM than Windows. I never saw an Apricot running Windows prior to the PC-compatible models.

I wish I'd been able to "acquire" one of the ACT Apricots that my dad's old work had. They were "portable" in the sense they had a handle very firmly attached, and I think the keyboard (which had a little strip of hotkeys with an LCD screen above - waaay ahead of you, Apple) clipped into the bottom of the unit.

The Apricot F1 was another cool one, about the size of a shoebox with a trackball rather than a mouse - when no-one else had any kind of pointing device!

I seem to recall that I used Windows 2 on a RM Nimbus 80186 at school around 1984. It was for CAM.

Nowadays one of my customers has a sodding great machine that boots DOS 6. To get data files to and from it I use Samba with all the safety catches switched off (on one side only) as a go between.

I used some (pirated) software that included a bundled Windows 2 runtime on an Amstrad PC1512 with CGA (but enhanced to 16 colors in 640x200 to make GEM look good in the sales brochures) in the late 80s. The Windows app ran in mono 640x200.

This unlocked some memories.

This linked article on Windows 2 is also excellent.

It also goes into the history of GUIs.

https://www.ninakalinina.com/notes/win2/

> oscilloscope charts

Those are price charts for pork belly futures.

Congratulations! This should really breathe some new life into the Apricot, particularly now that you have a functioning word processor.

never played with windows 2 but looks pretty awesome.

i think in this era the home market was largely saturated by home machines (atari st, amiga, apple 2+, a little macintosh). i don't remember a lot of pc juniors or other machines running windows 2, maybe some tandy machines but i think they were still more expensive than the home stuff.

Nina is a ledge, you should follow on mastodon.

Superb. Excellent sleuthing and development, and well written-up too.

I supported a few Apricot machines in production in the late 1980s, and Sirius too, although I had forgotten the strange keyboard layout. It always was a better design than IBM's PC, or XT or AT come to that.

It had long seemed to me that if Apricot and the other non-PC-compatible DOS vendors had just been able to hang on in there until later in the Windows era than the fairly bad Windows 1 that they'd have suddenly had a much better chance. This work sort of serves as an existence proof: given Windows 2, an 8086-based Apricot is suddenly much more compatible with way more mainstream PC software than it was running DOS.

Apricot did survive, of course. The only SCO UNIX…

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/sco-unix-3-2-0f-limping-along/

… machine I ever installed was an Apricot VX/FT server…

https://ardent-tool.com/Apricot/vxft/

… a huge tower server on castors with a built-in UPS as well as 5.25" drive bays. Before we provisioned it with UNIX and deployed it at the customer's site, we put DOS and Castle Wolfenstein on it, and me and 2 colleagues played Wolftenstein while trundling it up and down a (very smooth) corridor. Its built-in UPS was beefy enough to drive a colour VGA monitor as well as the computer, so with the screen balanced on the system unit, 1 colleague rolled the server while another colleague rolled an office chair with the player sitting on it.

This machine showed Apricot again backing the wrong horse: it's the highest-end x86 IBM Microchannel machine I ever worked on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture

MCA was better than PC ISA or VL-bus and for some things better than EISA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Arc...

SCO UNIX was also arguably SCO backing the wrong horse too. I learned Unix on the older SCO Xenix:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

… which was smaller, simpler, and faster. SCO UNIX was more "official" but not better in any useful way.

However, Xenix had serious issues, some of which Charlie Stross recently documented in a comment on my blog:

https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/97149.html#comments

… SCO Xenix was -- and for compatibility had to be -- built with MS C, not AT&T C. So every copy of every SCO OS meant SCO had to pay a lot of royalties.