6,654 pages: 1,289 machines, 702 software, 460 companies, 64 history, 17 articles, 59 fun. 4,336 media files so far; references to files not downloaded yet are left out. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YDRjtmAiNpo5mK5N3d7QwZ
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title, categories, types, origins, years, cpus, params
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| ACT Apricot F2 / F10 |
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Unlike the Apricot F1 which was a kind of bridge between the home-computing and the professional markets, the F2 and the F10 were clearly marketed as business machines.
They were quite similar to the F1, but included an extra expansion slot, more memory and larger storage capacity : two disk-drives for the F2 and one disk-drive and a 10MB hard-disk for the F10.
Like the F1, the F2 and F10 had an infra-red interface for the keyboard and the mouse/trackball (the same infra-red mouseball pointing device used with the Apricot Portable). This interesting feature was not very convenient because you had to ensure that there was no object blocking the signals between the keyboard/mouse and the computer, and you also had to power the keyboard with batteries! However, the systems originally shipped with a plastic light-pipe that could be connected between the keyboard and CPU so that obstacles would not block the signal.
The F2/F10 were quite similar in shape to the F1. The same narrow, very deep and stylish case. The F10 had the same disk front-panel as the F1 but a different arrangement of the LED indicators (power, caps, disk, stop), infra-red sensors and logo. The F2 had different shaped disk-drives but identical LEDs, logo and infra-red sensors as the F1.
The F2 and the F10 use an Apricot-modified version of MS-DOS, so they were not really IBM compatible.
They were provided with a nice graphical and iconized interface called Activity. Integrated were a desktop, and software including a wordprocessor, communication, painting and Basic. They were also sold with GEM Write, GEM Paint and the GEM desktop.
These systems were quite expensive and not really IBM PC compatible, so they were not a great success, even in the UK, their native country. Initially, there were not even compatible with the F1. A new ROM had to be developed for the F1 !