Windows 2 for the Apricot Pc/xi
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Delving into the fascinating world of retro computing, a recent discovery has sparked nostalgia and curiosity around the ACT Apricot PC/Xi and its compatibility with Windows 2. The original poster's findings on running Windows 2 on this 1980s machine have triggered a lively discussion among commenters, who are sharing their own experiences with other non-standard PCs of the era, such as the Tandy 2000 and Amstrad PC1512. As commenters geek out over the technical details, they're also swapping stories of their childhood encounters with these quirky computers, with some even recalling the Mindset II's impressive (if interlaced) graphics capabilities. The thread is a treasure trove of retro tech nostalgia, with commenters enthusiastically sharing their memories and insights.
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Dec 27, 2025 at 1:22 PM EST
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Not only could it run Windows 1.0, Microsoft used the Tandy 2000 internally for Windows development because 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.
Mindset Mindset II.
Could the Mindset do 640x400 noninterlaced?
I wonder if there's some Japanese x86 machines from the "IBM workalike" era.
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.
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...
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!
Probably all gone in the skip now, the factory is sitting closed and empty.
Keycaps tended to be molded with a hollow cylinder or stalk on their base, which fitted through a 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.
There is a stack exchange question about this at [1].
It is worth noting that keyboards in that era were machine-specific, and often hard-wired to the main system box. Afaik standardisation didn't happen until rs232 and, later, ps2 keyboards were introduced.
[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/16471/why...
So, I think it is a mechanical/electrical limitation.
I think it's just what they did in the 80s.
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.
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!
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.
Maybe in the "who can make the cheapest clone" business. Because plenty of outfits still offered machines that set themselves apart.
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.
Android tablets with detachable keyboards.
Chromebooks as well.
The only PCs left with customisation are those aquariums full of rainbows, built by gamers.
The Olivetti M24 was a PC compatible.
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.
Those are price charts for pork belly futures.
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.
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.
It also goes into the history of GUIs.
https://www.ninakalinina.com/notes/win2/
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.