[HN Gopher] Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi
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Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 160 points
Date : 2025-12-27 18:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ninakalinina.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ninakalinina.com)
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| nkali wrote:
| Hi, the article's author here~
|
| I just checked the Tandy 2000 Windows pre-installation - it has
| the drivers unpacked, which means you can just get the Slow
| Boot Windows 2.0, and put the drivers from this floppy to it.
| And the fonts, of course. Definitely do not check this bad
| pirate website that has it:
| https://winworldpc.com/product/tandy-2000-ms-windows-pre-Ins...
| spankibalt wrote:
| > "[...] in the early 1980s it was the only x86 machine out
| there that could do hi-res (640x400) color graphics."
|
| Mindset Mindset II.
| bitwize wrote:
| Which was also a 186-based PC-incompatible.
|
| Could the Mindset do 640x400 noninterlaced?
| spankibalt wrote:
| Neither Mindset nor Mindset II. Mindset II had the 640 x
| 400 four-color mode upgrade. Double-buffered but
| interlaced. Could be genlocked to another Mindset.
| bitwize wrote:
| The Tandy 2000 could do 640x400 8-color noninterlaced. It
| was pretty useful as a CAD and DTP workstation, predating
| even the EGA by a year, which is why it was chosen to
| develop and test color Windows.
| spankibalt wrote:
| The Mindset machines were (also) advertised as _Video
| Production System_ , with custom VLSI chips and modules
| for graphics and video workflows and assorted
| applications (e. g. Lumena). So a bit of a different
| market.
|
| I wonder if there's some top-class Japanese x86 machines
| from the "IBM workalike" era.
| bitwize wrote:
| Indeed. At the time, Tandy was trying to break into the
| business market with its computer offerings, and the
| 2000's software library reflects that, including
| MultiMate, Basic Four, Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony with hi-
| res graphic/charting add-ons, a version of Ashton-Tate's
| Framework, and the best desktop version of AutoCAD
| available at the time. The Mindset and Amiga lapped it in
| terms of video, audio, and in particular NTSC- and
| composite-compatible output capabilities, but machines
| that were targeting those workflows were doing something
| very different from the generic business market (which
| Windows, at the time, was aimed squarely at).
|
| A composite compatible output addon, called the TV/Game
| Adapter, was planned but never released for the Tandy
| 2000; if released it might not have supported genlocking
| or really much beyond getting 16-color 320x200 or so
| video onto a TV. Until recently the only graphical game I
| recall actually being released for the machine was a
| special version of Flight Simulator; but recently on
| Facebook I saw a photo of a 2000 running some sort of
| video poker or other card game. It was unlikely to have
| been very fast paced and may even have been written in
| GW-BASIC; I don't know much about it.
| lysace wrote:
| 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.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| 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!
| nkali wrote:
| The model I have is exactly like this, with a handle and a
| clip. You can still get one! :)
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Yours is the later one with the hard disk, the ones that my
| dad had at work were beige with two floppies. They also had
| some Sirius 1s, one of which had a hard disk.
|
| Probably all gone in the skip now, the factory is sitting
| closed and empty.
| xuhu wrote:
| Why are the Shift and Caps Lock keys shaped like that ? Is it
| because those wide keys cannot be pressed from the ends ?
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| I have no idea, but I do have a PC/AT keyboard with
| similarly-shaped keys. They have the usual "square horseshoe"
| / "anti-roll bar for Matchbox cars" arrangement underneath so
| they don't rock when you press the end.
|
| I think it's just what they did in the 80s.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I believe you're right. From my limited memory of that
| period, it was a mechanical constraint.
|
| Keycaps tended to be molded with a hollow cylinder or stalk
| on their base, which fitted through a snug round aperture on
| the keyboard base and pressed against a spring or other
| restraint. Pressing the key down against the spring actuated
| a pcb-mounted push-switch (or bridged a pair of adjacent
| connectors on the pcb) that provided the keypress signal.
| Pressing a wide key off-centre would cause the plastic stalk
| to bind against the enclosing aperture. Forcing the user to
| press direcly above the stalk mitigates this - hence the
| raised part of the keycap.
|
| There is a stack exchange question about this at [1].
|
| As to why the shift keys were wider to begin with, I'm not
| sure. Perhaps a consequence of the lack of the mechanical
| constraints that forced typewriter keyboards into a strict
| grid due to the interleaving of the lever arms. Some
| keyboards, notably the Commodore PET, didn't use wide shift
| keys [2] though.
|
| It is worth noting that keyboards in that era were machine-
| specific, and often hard-wired to the main system box. Afaik
| standardisation and interoperability didn't happen until
| RS232 and, later, ps2 keyboards were introduced.
|
| [1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/16471/
| why...
|
| [2] and let me just say here that the PET keyboard was truly
| awful, even by 80s standards. Just shamefully terrible.
| nkali wrote:
| The keyboard on the Apricot uses round capacitive foam pads
| under the keys. This means the keys had to be square, or
| they needed a mechanical thing like the space button on the
| photo here: https://www.baffo71.com/details.php?id_img=7
|
| So, I think it is a mechanical/electrical limitation.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I don't know how many of these Apricot PCs I had as a kid. By
| the late eighties I was buying them for PS1 a piece second hand
| as nobody wanted them (nobody could figure out why they didn't
| run PC software). I'd already had a couple of old Sirius 1
| computers for a while, so I'd amassed a lot of "DOS compatible"
| programs that would work, and there was always the hope with
| every new PC you bought it would have some random new gem
| hidden on the HDD that you hadn't seen before.
| bboreham wrote:
| 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.
| rjsw wrote:
| The initial Apricot model came with GSX, I don't think there
| was a GEM driver for the 800x400 screen.
| nkali wrote:
| There are two now; one from GEM 1.2 and one from FreeGEM.
| nkali wrote:
| That's what I've heard, too! But apparently there even was an
| effort to port Windows 2.11 to XEN, though I have no idea
| whether it was ever completed.
| roryirvine wrote:
| They switched focus to Windows around 1988, I believe - it was
| around the same time they started using the MCA bus (I believe
| they ended up as most successful non-IBM MCA vendor), so
| perhaps they had been convinced by the hype around Windows
| being a sort of interim OS/2?
|
| Whatever the reason, the Qi-386 (and its ISA-based derivative
| Xen-i) was often combined with the Deskside Environment Pack,
| consisting of a trackball, infrared smartcard reader, and
| Win/386.
|
| My dad's small publishing company had a bunch of them, running
| Aldus PageMaker and FreeHand. Lovely machines, and about half
| the price of the equivalent Mac IIs!
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Nina is a ledge, you should follow on mastodon.
| dekuNukem wrote:
| 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.
| spankibalt wrote:
| > "Then everyone started to do 100% compatible clones, and it
| was a race to the bottom."
|
| Maybe in the "who can make the cheapest clone" business.
| Because post-consolidation, plenty of outfits offered machines
| that set themselves apart. They had to.
| Firehawke wrote:
| I wouldn't even call it a "race" to the bottom. It took until
| maybe 1995 for prices to drop enough for some of the clone
| manufacturers to start going out of business. Radio Shack
| caught on around 1991 and got out early, but Zeos didn't go
| out of business until 1995 for instance.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which is why nowadays vertical integration like everyone was
| doing back then is back.
|
| As survivor of that era, Apple proved the point of higher
| margins, and the remaining OEMs want a piece of the pie, even
| better if it is ARM based instead of x86.
| MBCook wrote:
| Is anyone doing vertical integration in the computer space
| besides Apple?
| rjsw wrote:
| The original Apricot was basically a luggable Sirius 1. ACT was
| the European distributor of the Sirius.
|
| The Olivetti M24 was a PC compatible.
| gerdesj wrote:
| 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Nimbus was another one of these "DOS Compatible" kinda-IBMish
| things that you could get a lot of stuff to work on. It must
| have had at least CGA compatibility because of all the DOS
| games that would work. It was the first machine I must have
| used Windows 2.0 on, but I barely touched Windows before 3.0.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| RM Nimbus was an awesome line of machines from what I recall.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Totally underrated machines.
| nl wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > oscilloscope charts
|
| Those are price charts for pork belly futures.
| nkali wrote:
| Oh no, you're right How do I unsee this
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Congratulations! This should really breathe some new life into
| the Apricot, particularly now that you have a functioning word
| processor.
| nkali wrote:
| For the record, a text-mode SuperWriter is the default word
| processor for the Apricot - but its format is not well
| understood by modern tools, unfortunately.
| andai wrote:
| This linked article on Windows 2 is also excellent.
|
| It also goes into the history of GUIs.
|
| https://www.ninakalinina.com/notes/win2/
| a-dub wrote:
| 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.
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