ACT/Apricot Advert - January 1993

Apricot had started out as ACT - Applied Computer Techniques - in 1965 as a computer time-sharing bureau.

Its first major break came in 1982 when it signed a deal with Chuck Peddle - father of the 6502 processor and the Commodore PET - to import Peddle's new computer, built by Victor as the Victor 9000 in the US, but known in the UK as the Sirius 1.

Before long, ACT announced its own computer - Project Apricot - in the spring of 1983.

Unusually, this shipped with Sirius, rather than IBM, compatibility, although at the time it made some sense as IBM's PC didn't start shipping into the UK until 1983, meaning that the Sirius 1 had built up quite a lead.

However, after talks with Tandy about jointly creating an "Apple buster" failed, ACT instead used its Victor connections as a way to get into the US market.

Unfortunately for ACT, the US market was already gravitating around the IBM PC, and so the Apricot's Sirius compatiblity was more of a hindrance. As ACT's managing director Peter Horn said:

"The US market had gone [IBM] compatible by then, so we didn't sell that many products".

The company tried and failed again when it launched its Xen series - one of the first Intel 80286-based machines - which was also Sirius, rather than IBM, compatible.

Horn equated hanging on to Sirius compatiblity for so long as a "smoker giving up smoking", stating in an interview in January 1993's Personal Computer World that:

"By then we knew it was too late. They should not have been Sirius compatible, they should have been IBM compatible, so we were a year late^[1]".

The company, by now re-named as Apricot, after its first own-built computer, seemed to finally get the message, and in 1987 shifted to being not just compatible, but "really compatible", launching a range of micros based on IBM's new-at-the-time Micro Channel Architecture (MCA).

It became one of the few companies to offer MCA (PS/2) compatiblity, which whilst not particularly mainstream, did apparently give it a way into some of IBM's own accounts.

It the beginning of 1990, Apricot changed its name back to ACT, but only a few months later the computing part of the company was purchased by Mitsubishi, with ACT retaining the software publishing part of the business.

This marked the end of Apricot as "maverick innovators", with subsequent computers - such as the Xen-LS II of the advert - being far more conventional IBM clones.

The Xen-LS II - which seemed at least in part aimed at the multimedia market with an on-board FM synthesizer and "stereo digital mixing desk" - featured Intel's 486DX running at 33MHz, and offered three full-sized ISA slots by way of expansion.

Slightly more interestingly, it offered built-in Ethernet with support for the three types of cabling available at the time: thick coaxial cabling, thin coax, and twisted pair, now more normally known as 10Base-T, "Cat 5" or "Cat 6".

It retailed for £2,113, which is about £5,460 in 2025.