Apricot Computers was a British electronic company that produced desktop personal computers in the mid-1980s.
Overview
Apricot Computers was a British manufacturer of business PCs, founded in 1965 as "Applied Computer Techniques" (ACT),[1][2][3] later changing its name to Apricot Computers, Ltd. It was a wholly owned UK company, until it was acquired in the early 1990s by the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. It was hoped that this acquisition would help them compete against Japanese PC manufacturers, in particular NEC, which commanded over 50% of the Japanese market at the time. Mitsubishi eventually shut down the Apricot brand, with a management buyout that resulted in a new company Network Si UK Ltd being formed. In 2008, a new, independent Apricot company was launched in the UK.
Apricot was an innovative computer hardware company, whose Birmingham R&D centre had the capacity to build every aspect of a personal computer except for the integrated circuits (chips) themselves; from custom BIOS and system-level programming to the silk-screen of motherboards and metal-bending for internal chassis all the way to radio-frequency testing of a finished system.
This manufacturing capability, coupled with a smart and aggressive engineering team, allowed Apricot to be the first company in the world with several technical innovations that includes the first commercial shipment of an all-in-one system with a 3.5-inch floppy drive (ahead of Apple).[4] In the early 1990s, they also manufactured one of the world's most secure x86-based PCs, which was sold exclusively to the UK government.[4]
Their technical innovation led them down some paths which were technically advanced but proved to be highly disadvantageous in the marketplace. For example, when
Micro Channel Architecture
(MCA), Apricot was the only other OEM using it, in their Apricot Qi and VX FT ranges of PCs. This left the company at a technical dead-end without the financial or market power which helped IBM survive the failure of MCA.
Apricot continued to experiment with unusual form-factors in a market dominated by standardised 'beige boxes'. They produced a range of high-availability servers (the VX and Shogun ranges) with integrated uninterruptible power supply (UPS), low-profile 'LANStation', PCs specifically designed for use on office networks and diskless workstations booted over the network.
This long-running pattern of tenaciously investing in technical innovation and complete end-to-end system design and manufacture created technically excellent computers, but meant that Apricot was slow to adapt as the global market grew and changed.
By the mid-1990s major PC OEMs such as Compaq and Hewlett-Packard were outsourcing their own complete end-to-end system design and manufacture to
Original Design Manufacturers
(ODMs) based in Taiwan, and were moving at least some of their manufacturing to cheaper locations overseas.
Apricot was very late in adopting this method of manufacturing, even though a motherboard designed and manufactured in Asia cost Apricot as little as a third of the cost of design and testing in Birmingham and manufacture in Scotland.
Apricot eventually tried to move to outsourcing but the market outpaced them, and MELCO closed the company down, selling off the final assets in 1999. A management buyout resulted in a new company, Network Si UK Ltd being formed.
The Sirius 1 became the most popular 16-bit business computer in Europe, especially in Britain and Germany, while IBM delayed the release of the PC there. Its success led to the
IBM PC
. It had two floppy disks, and was one of the first systems to use 3.5" disks, rather than the 5.25" disks which were the norm at the time.
The graphics quality was critically acclaimed, with an 800×400 resolution and a keyboard with eight "normal" function keys and six flat programmable ones, associated with a built-in
Lotus 123 was also available, and took advantage of the machine's high-resolution graphics. A flap covered the floppy drives when not in use. The industrial design of the machine was well conceived. The keyboard could be clipped to the base of the machine, and an integrated handle used for transporting it. The supplied green phosphor monitor had a nylon mesh glare filter.[6]
A model with a built-in 10 MB hard disk (known as the Apricot PC Xi) was made available later in 1984.