Regarding the 3.5" floppies. It seems that Jonos Ltd.were the first to sell a computer with a 3.5-inch drive… in 1982! ua-cam.com/video/djsyVgTGaRk/v-deo.html
As an almost 50 year old Brit, I'd like to point out that we're not hobbits, we have and always have had, normal sized offices and desks. Also, first time viewer thanks to the algorithm. I like the style and content, subscribed.
New viewer and as someone that grew up knee deep in British Electronic Eccentricities - Love the banter and side comments. All very on point. Subscribed!
The factory was at Glenrothes, a "new town" in Fife, north of Edinburgh. Rodime were in the same town, so it made sense to use their drives. Some of the drives had a problem - not spinning up on cold mornings. It turned out that water condensed on the platter, and surface tension caused the heads to act as brakes. The OFFICIAL work-around was to thump the right-hand side of the cabinet with the heel of your hand. This caused the heads to bounce into the air, and the platters started turning. When re-assembling, the central screws in the back panel don't line up because of the weight of the power supply. Turn the box upside down, as they did at the factory!
Working in dealer support, I used an Xi with a 5 MB drive to set up the first machine running Microsoft Networks. Later I set up the H/W and S/W for the UK launch, in a fancy London hotel, with Bill G appearing by video link. That demo to the press was the very first time that everything in our script went through properly without having to reboot the server. Still have the T-shirt. 😀
My father ran a business in the UK, i got access to allot of machines out of office hours, sirius, victor, apricot xen, osborne luggable, even an almarc you turned on with a key if a remember rightly. also i loved using GEM paint, not found many channels covering this period. hercules cards running ventura publisher.
I remember one of those Apricot PCs turning up at the lab when I was lecturing computer programming back in the 1980s. It was a cool piece of kit but really suffered from the lack of IBM PC compatibility.
Scott’s Valley! Former home of Borland - whose building is now occupied by the Blackburn Tire company. SCO also had HQ in Scotts Valley. Nice HP printer BTW.
Another rather interesting 8086 system was made in the former East Germany. The Robotron A7150 used 16-bit Multibus as the system bus and it ran an OS called DCP which was highly compatible with MS-DOS 3.3. Unlike the Sirius it used standard 5.25-inch floppy disks. It also was available with a UNIX-like OS called MUTOS which took full advantage of the 16-bit bus. The BIOS reminds me very much of that on Olivetti machines.
Great video. There is actually a reset button on the right hand side of the keyboard next to the contrast control for the LCD screen. I have a video on the history of ACT on my channel, it includes footage of the ACT 800, which was produced by CompuThink. I've lost momentum with my videos, but I'll get back to the series on the history of ACT in due course.
Huh! I tried that button before recording and it wouldn't do anything. I wonder if it's just stuck or dirty and I didn't lean into it hard enough. My Xen is like that. If you can do a video on the ACT 800 I'd love to see it!
@CelGenStudios If you have had the keyboard apart to replace the 'foam and foil' pads, then it is easy for the reset button to become misaligned. However, if you feel the microswitch engage, the alignment is probably fine. My video on the relationship between software for the Commodore PET and ACT, 'Putting the business into CBM', includes a cameo appearance of an ACT 800 at the Centre for Computing History, Cambridge, UK. I don't have one in my collection.
Honestly for it's time having something you could carry with one hand and a bag with the monitor, accessories and your stuff in the other would be a big deal. The Mac beats it for portability but there wasn't a lot in the PC realm that could do that. I mean the original compaq and what not that were "luggable" but luggable in the sense they needed wheels. I have somewhat faint memories of lugging those luggables. This formfactor kinda reminds me of dedicated semi portable word processors that were around in the 80s and early 90s. I have yet to see anyone do a video on those. I guess everyone hates them as much as I do.
After working at Byteshop I went home Dad bought a Victor 9000, I then set my business up we wrote a dbase accounts program for the Sirrius, sold two copies. I just sat and read magazines then I handed out some business cards locally, the company across the road was interested, but I had nothing to show, by magic three apricots were delivered meant for a company with a similar name, I demoed one of the Apricots sat next to three box's as if we were busy. My first sale, I sent them to the correct company the next day. The apricots were better than the IBM for sure. We sold an external hard disk from Plus 5 that could be connected to a few Apricots at the same time as my first network. I love your work, I honestly can not remember opening an Apricot we must have to install the controller, it was great to see inside.
A really interesting machine. I think Sony first used the initial version of the 3.5 inch drives for their own SMC line of computers which were only sold in Japan. The SMC-70 was a business computer that came out in 1982 and you could get it with one or two floppy drives. At the end of 1983 Sony also sold the SMC-777 which was a high-end homecomputer. Both used text menu based software for easier usability, even for system operation… The first generation disks came without the spring for the metal shutter, so before using them you had to manually slide them in order to make the disk accessible. These first generation disks have rounded edges on the cutout for the disk access inside the metal shutter.
The second cable on the HDD controller is actually for a 2nd disk, those controllers used a shared cable and an separate control cable (or the other way around, one cable is shared on both drives in any case. And the second cable selects primary and secondary basically.
I used an Apricot pc {slightly different to this one) back in college in the uk in the mid 1980s, lovely machine. The infrared keyboard with the lcd display was way ahead of its time. The keyboard had an optional light pipe cable so it wouldn't interfere with other machines nearby. Great fun sneaking up behind a classmate and typing obscenities into their work lol. I think they ran a version of CPM but I could be wrong, it was a long time ago. We always pronounced it ape-re-cot btw.
Almost certainly an F1 or an F2 (there was also a rare F10, with one floppy and a 10MB drive) . Just because they COULD, the hardware reset button was actually on the keyboard, only linked to the main box by the infrared link!
@DaimlerSleeveValve just had a quick Google and I think the ones I used were f1 or f1e. A lot of the pictures show the f1 without an lcd in the keyboard which the ones I used definitely had though.
That's really neat having the calculator in the keyboard and have it send results as keyboard input. I almost want a stand-alone keypad with that functionality now as a curio. Apparently they are readily available and cheap. Never crossed my mind before now. But it must have been a novel idea back in the 80s.
This is one of the first PC systems I used at work - the keyboard also had a calculator function which worked when the computer was powered off and if on, you could send the result to the cursor position - it actually worked really well!
My main retrocomputing interest is the RM Nimbus, another British DOS-compatible non-PC-compatible, with an 80186 CPU. They're fairly specific to education.
I sold Apricot systems while going to college in the mid to late 80s in Searcy Arkansas. They were really nice computers but the weird floppy format (at the time) made them really difficult to sell in the IBM compatible dominated world. I really wish I had one of them to add to my retro collection. We also sold Franklin (Apple ][ clone), Columbia (pc compatible) and Commodore computers.
The serial port NEEDED the 25-pin connector. It was capable of running Synchronous comms as well as the cheaper Asynchronous. If you wanted to talk to an IBM mainframe, you needed synchronous. The connector was the same as used on an IBM 3276 terminal.
That's very interesting - I haven't seen the original GEM for the PC/Xi, and went to the length of writing my own driver to get FreeGEM running on it. The alternative BIOS is new to me as well.
If I am not wrong, these were the times when the software was OS compatible (I mean early 80s). I remember getting few floppies with some CP/M programs for a computer and running that software just fine on my home built computer that was quite different (an modified ZX Spectrum clone), both computers had Z80 CPU inside and 64k RAM. So, is no wonder that before IBM compatible there was CP/M or MSDOS compatible stuff. Well, it did not lasted too long, but I understand that for many that was not an issue, as long there was software to be used and most business software did not used strange hardware features, I mean software like spreadsheets, text editors. Have you tried to run some old WordStar, Word Perfect, Lotus123, OrCAD, PSpice? Or even some very old XT games?
I have a few other Apricot titles and they all work fine along with the titles I demonstrated in the video but nothing that was IBM compatible would work, even with emulation.
I had one of those until earlier this year, then traded it for an HD20 at VCF West because the Rodime drive was missing. Then at VCF Midwest a month later I found the missing Rodime SCSI disk.
Ape-ricot :p I had a beige colour one of these for a while. I thought you could use the display as a calculator too? probably remembering another keyboard with LCD
The twin floppy apricots were cream coloured, the black XI's were hard disk machines and the rare, light grey machines were .32 lan covus servers based on Corvus Omninet. These were not very popular.
Thank God putting the battery in the keyboard saves the computer itself from battery damage 30 years later. Phew. Thank goodness those proprietary keyboads are so easy to replace when they suffer corrosion instead 😂
It's just a clip from a much larger tape that ACT released around the same time. I'm not sure a full video of the launch event even exists. ua-cam.com/video/-gy5P9EElYo/v-deo.html
John, recently I unsubscribed a channel just because he called his subscribers "my fans". I am pretty good at not being a fan of anything but I gotta admit, I think I am a fan of both you and your channel. Your channel feels like a flashback from a big production movie. I am also pretty good about seeing shortcomings of anything but I wouldn't even touch the white balance of your camera, it is just perfect. Best regards from Turkiye, brother
I'm not in this for the money or the fame. I just like showing stuff off and seeing if I can talk about it without reading a script or using a ton of stock footage in favor of other items from within my collection. I'm sure that is partly why these videos feel a bit more refreshing compared to the many, many other tech channels talking about old stuff. Weather you are or are not subscribed to my channel I do appreciate the feedback because I know someone watched it and possibly learned something new and that is my goal. :)
@CelGenStudios exactly! Naturalty adds to the charm. I am subscribed for more than a year now after watching one of your videos for the first time. Recently I started to be more active. They are very informative and also very entertaining. Thanks :)
It’s British. Which means it’s cheap, weird and poorly made. There’s a reason why Britain lost all of its native manufacturing industry. I am British btw.
Regarding the 3.5" floppies. It seems that Jonos Ltd.were the first to sell a computer with a 3.5-inch drive… in 1982!
ua-cam.com/video/djsyVgTGaRk/v-deo.html
Right! I forgot about that system! >_>
Okay then I stand corrected, ACT was *not* the third user of the format.
As an almost 50 year old Brit, I'd like to point out that we're not hobbits, we have and always have had, normal sized offices and desks.
Also, first time viewer thanks to the algorithm. I like the style and content, subscribed.
I think the point is more that American businessmen like abnormally large desks
New viewer and as someone that grew up knee deep in British Electronic Eccentricities - Love the banter and side comments. All very on point. Subscribed!
The factory was at Glenrothes, a "new town" in Fife, north of Edinburgh. Rodime were in the same town, so it made sense to use their drives. Some of the drives had a problem - not spinning up on cold mornings. It turned out that water condensed on the platter, and surface tension caused the heads to act as brakes. The OFFICIAL work-around was to thump the right-hand side of the cabinet with the heel of your hand. This caused the heads to bounce into the air, and the platters started turning.
When re-assembling, the central screws in the back panel don't line up because of the weight of the power supply. Turn the box upside down, as they did at the factory!
Working in dealer support, I used an Xi with a 5 MB drive to set up the first machine running Microsoft Networks. Later I set up the H/W and S/W for the UK launch, in a fancy London hotel, with Bill G appearing by video link. That demo to the press was the very first time that everything in our script went through properly without having to reboot the server. Still have the T-shirt. 😀
What a great way to start a Sunday morning! Please keep these videos with odd non-IBM compatible systems coming. You've really hit a gold mine here
My father ran a business in the UK, i got access to allot of machines out of office hours, sirius, victor, apricot xen, osborne luggable, even an almarc you turned on with a key if a remember rightly. also i loved using GEM paint, not found many channels covering this period. hercules cards running ventura publisher.
I remember one of those Apricot PCs turning up at the lab when I was lecturing computer programming back in the 1980s. It was a cool piece of kit but really suffered from the lack of IBM PC compatibility.
This is really one of the most refreshing channels to watch! Love your content, even the crocs.
I second that! 👌
your channel is such a vibe and I'm so here for it
also WHAT? that keyboard is nuts!!! :V
Scott’s Valley! Former home of Borland - whose building is now occupied by the Blackburn Tire company. SCO also had HQ in Scotts Valley. Nice HP printer BTW.
Another rather interesting 8086 system was made in the former East Germany. The Robotron A7150 used 16-bit Multibus as the system bus and it ran an OS called DCP which was highly compatible with MS-DOS 3.3. Unlike the Sirius it used standard 5.25-inch floppy disks. It also was available with a UNIX-like OS called MUTOS which took full advantage of the 16-bit bus. The BIOS reminds me very much of that on Olivetti machines.
Love love love the video. Thank you for sharing and giving us the whole story - id love to see more system ON time. Thank you. We enjoy.
Great video. There is actually a reset button on the right hand side of the keyboard next to the contrast control for the LCD screen. I have a video on the history of ACT on my channel, it includes footage of the ACT 800, which was produced by CompuThink. I've lost momentum with my videos, but I'll get back to the series on the history of ACT in due course.
Huh! I tried that button before recording and it wouldn't do anything. I wonder if it's just stuck or dirty and I didn't lean into it hard enough. My Xen is like that.
If you can do a video on the ACT 800 I'd love to see it!
@CelGenStudios If you have had the keyboard apart to replace the 'foam and foil' pads, then it is easy for the reset button to become misaligned. However, if you feel the microswitch engage, the alignment is probably fine. My video on the relationship between software for the Commodore PET and ACT, 'Putting the business into CBM', includes a cameo appearance of an ACT 800 at the Centre for Computing History, Cambridge, UK. I don't have one in my collection.
That monitor sliding groove is just simply good design. Great video.
Honestly for it's time having something you could carry with one hand and a bag with the monitor, accessories and your stuff in the other would be a big deal. The Mac beats it for portability but there wasn't a lot in the PC realm that could do that. I mean the original compaq and what not that were "luggable" but luggable in the sense they needed wheels. I have somewhat faint memories of lugging those luggables. This formfactor kinda reminds me of dedicated semi portable word processors that were around in the 80s and early 90s. I have yet to see anyone do a video on those. I guess everyone hates them as much as I do.
After working at Byteshop I went home Dad bought a Victor 9000, I then set my business up we wrote a dbase accounts program for the Sirrius, sold two copies. I just sat and read magazines then I handed out some business cards locally, the company across the road was interested, but I had nothing to show, by magic three apricots were delivered meant for a company with a similar name, I demoed one of the Apricots sat next to three box's as if we were busy.
My first sale, I sent them to the correct company the next day. The apricots were better than the IBM for sure. We sold an external hard disk from Plus 5 that could be connected to a few Apricots at the same time as my first network. I love your work, I honestly can not remember opening an Apricot we must have to install the controller, it was great to see inside.
A really interesting machine. I think Sony first used the initial version of the 3.5 inch drives for their own SMC line of computers which were only sold in Japan. The SMC-70 was a business computer that came out in 1982 and you could get it with one or two floppy drives. At the end of 1983 Sony also sold the SMC-777 which was a high-end homecomputer. Both used text menu based software for easier usability, even for system operation…
The first generation disks came without the spring for the metal shutter, so before using them you had to manually slide them in order to make the disk accessible. These first generation disks have rounded edges on the cutout for the disk access inside the metal shutter.
That's a lovely looking system!
I really liked this video.
this looks so baller, id love to see more pcs with that design
The second cable on the HDD controller is actually for a 2nd disk, those controllers used a shared cable and an separate control cable (or the other way around, one cable is shared on both drives in any case. And the second cable selects primary and secondary basically.
I think I still have the enclosure somewhere - they came in beige or black. The MFM drives have all died over the years.😪
I used an Apricot pc {slightly different to this one) back in college in the uk in the mid 1980s, lovely machine. The infrared keyboard with the lcd display was way ahead of its time. The keyboard had an optional light pipe cable so it wouldn't interfere with other machines nearby. Great fun sneaking up behind a classmate and typing obscenities into their work lol. I think they ran a version of CPM but I could be wrong, it was a long time ago.
We always pronounced it ape-re-cot btw.
Almost certainly an F1 or an F2 (there was also a rare F10, with one floppy and a 10MB drive) . Just because they COULD, the hardware reset button was actually on the keyboard, only linked to the main box by the infrared link!
@DaimlerSleeveValve just had a quick Google and I think the ones I used were f1 or f1e. A lot of the pictures show the f1 without an lcd in the keyboard which the ones I used definitely had though.
That's really neat having the calculator in the keyboard and have it send results as keyboard input. I almost want a stand-alone keypad with that functionality now as a curio.
Apparently they are readily available and cheap. Never crossed my mind before now. But it must have been a novel idea back in the 80s.
This is one of the first PC systems I used at work - the keyboard also had a calculator function which worked when the computer was powered off and if on, you could send the result to the cursor position - it actually worked really well!
Hah! Just got to the last bit of the video where the calculator function is mentioned!! 😂
They had their "touch bar" back in the day
My thoughts exactly
Or rather Apple came late to the party.
Rodime also was the first company to produce a 3.5-in hard disk drive.
My main retrocomputing interest is the RM Nimbus, another British DOS-compatible non-PC-compatible, with an 80186 CPU. They're fairly specific to education.
I sold Apricot systems while going to college in the mid to late 80s in Searcy Arkansas. They were really nice computers but the weird floppy format (at the time) made them really difficult to sell in the IBM compatible dominated world. I really wish I had one of them to add to my retro collection. We also sold Franklin (Apple ][ clone), Columbia (pc compatible) and Commodore computers.
The serial port NEEDED the 25-pin connector. It was capable of running Synchronous comms as well as the cheaper Asynchronous. If you wanted to talk to an IBM mainframe, you needed synchronous. The connector was the same as used on an IBM 3276 terminal.
That's very interesting - I haven't seen the original GEM for the PC/Xi, and went to the length of writing my own driver to get FreeGEM running on it. The alternative BIOS is new to me as well.
The UK design that I know of is IBM's original PC from 1982.
That is a super sexy computer.
I was just comment on how much I liked the look of it!
Apricot did indeed make an F series Portable, which had some very interesting characteristics.
🤘
good stuff!
If I am not wrong, these were the times when the software was OS compatible (I mean early 80s). I remember getting few floppies with some CP/M programs for a computer and running that software just fine on my home built computer that was quite different (an modified ZX Spectrum clone), both computers had Z80 CPU inside and 64k RAM. So, is no wonder that before IBM compatible there was CP/M or MSDOS compatible stuff. Well, it did not lasted too long, but I understand that for many that was not an issue, as long there was software to be used and most business software did not used strange hardware features, I mean software like spreadsheets, text editors. Have you tried to run some old WordStar, Word Perfect, Lotus123, OrCAD, PSpice? Or even some very old XT games?
I have a few other Apricot titles and they all work fine along with the titles I demonstrated in the video but nothing that was IBM compatible would work, even with emulation.
Rodime used to make an awesome external SCSI drive for the compact Mac series.
I had one of those until earlier this year, then traded it for an HD20 at VCF West because the Rodime drive was missing.
Then at VCF Midwest a month later I found the missing Rodime SCSI disk.
Ape-ricot :p I had a beige colour one of these for a while. I thought you could use the display as a calculator too? probably remembering another keyboard with LCD
Yep. It also doubles as a calculator.
Компьютер для настоящих джентльменов.
The twin floppy apricots were cream coloured, the black XI's were hard disk machines and the rare, light grey machines were .32 lan covus servers based on Corvus Omninet. These were not very popular.
Yes, it is overlapping windows, this version of gem re-uses windows as you traverse a tree, click on another disk to get another window.
All it really needed was retractable cords to be portable.
That black colour is boootifull!
That is not MDA, that is Hercules, MDA has no graphics mode, Hercules does.
I'm afraid it's better than Hercules.. Hercules was 720 × 348, Apricot (and the Sirius 1) did 800 x 400 resolution.
Thank God putting the battery in the keyboard saves the computer itself from battery damage 30 years later. Phew. Thank goodness those proprietary keyboads are so easy to replace when they suffer corrosion instead 😂
.......yeah. I forgot about that...... >_>
@@CelGenStudios haha ;)
6:13 PLEASE PLEASE Please share the video of the launch event. It's very funny. It looks like the movie The Running Man.
It's just a clip from a much larger tape that ACT released around the same time. I'm not sure a full video of the launch event even exists.
ua-cam.com/video/-gy5P9EElYo/v-deo.html
Built in streamdeck in the keyboard 😂
John, recently I unsubscribed a channel just because he called his subscribers "my fans". I am pretty good at not being a fan of anything but I gotta admit, I think I am a fan of both you and your channel. Your channel feels like a flashback from a big production movie. I am also pretty good about seeing shortcomings of anything but I wouldn't even touch the white balance of your camera, it is just perfect.
Best regards from Turkiye, brother
I'm not in this for the money or the fame. I just like showing stuff off and seeing if I can talk about it without reading a script or using a ton of stock footage in favor of other items from within my collection. I'm sure that is partly why these videos feel a bit more refreshing compared to the many, many other tech channels talking about old stuff. Weather you are or are not subscribed to my channel I do appreciate the feedback because I know someone watched it and possibly learned something new and that is my goal. :)
@CelGenStudios exactly! Naturalty adds to the charm. I am subscribed for more than a year now after watching one of your videos for the first time. Recently I started to be more active. They are very informative and also very entertaining. Thanks :)
Darth Vader edition. Nice.
Love the way that YT flags your post with "Translate to English" ! 😄
“Cool but half baked“, indeed, the classic hallmark of British engineering!
oh god, Rodime, RUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I fitted a few only had a probem with one I dropped.
23:40 lol
ua-cam.com/video/ADkLBtSGKMo/v-deo.html
🤭
It’s British. Which means it’s cheap, weird and poorly made.
There’s a reason why Britain lost all of its native manufacturing industry.
I am British btw.
"It comes down to pronounciation". Yeah, a product for the UK market. It comes down to the British pronounciation.
Kids, a CPU isnt a system enclosure as mentioned here. Its a processor. Thats just the box the processor and all other bits live in.
I can't believe there are still people who confuse a case with a cpu
BALD 😅