ACT/Apricot Advert - May 1988

This advert from Apricot shows the company clearly aiming at the Desktop Publishing market that Apple was coming to own since the 1985 release of Aldus Pagemaker, and Apple's eventual release of Macs that weren't too slow to actually use.

By the end of 1988, Pagemaker had 60% of both the Mac as well as PC market^[1],

Apricot had even set up a network of Desktop Publishing Centres of Excellence, where potential users could try systems out, whilst even the adverts have got a bit more "design-ey", with a funky studio setting and barely a hint of computer hardware to be seen.

There was no specific Apricot DTP system, with at least Pagemaker, Ventura and Micrografx Designer - running on Windows 1 or 2 - being supported on Qi or Xen Apricot machines^[2].

Apricot's VX-series "Open Systems Computing" Servers, for up to 1,000 users. from Personal Computer World, June 1988

A common thread in Apricot adverts around this time is the tagline "Open Systems Computing". It's possibly a reference to the hardware bus common to Apricot and most other IBM compatibles at the time - the ISA, or later EISA, bus.

The pinnacle of Apricot's "open systems" so far was its VX range of network servers, launched in 1988, with the VX1000 supporting up to 48 users, 1.8 gigabytes of disk and various networking standards, including Ethernet, Omninet and Token Ring.

There was also the fridge-sized VX9800 with up to 30 Intel 80386 processors supporting up to 1,000 users.