Forgot one more! UK folks pls comment (RE: Another weekend haul

From: A.R. Duell <ard12_at_eng.cam.ac.uk>
Date: Tue May 27 18:20:58 1997

>
> Almost forgot - I also picked up an Apricot F2. For those in the US,
> this is one bizarre machine. It's only about 7" wide, 4" tall and 16"
> deep. It has a wireless infrared keyboard and wireless hand-held
> trackball!

I've never heard of an F2, but I have the original Apricot PC (wired
keyboard with a little LCD display on it), with schematics, and also the
TechRef for the F1, which sounds a little like your machine. That TechRef
is available from Mauritron for about \pounds 20.00, and is pretty useful
if you want to get amongst the machine.
 
> I never knew these were sold in the United States. It's marked 60Hz so
> it's not an import. About all I know about it is from a couple of web
> references -- 1985, 8086 CPU, 512K RAM, dual 720K drives, ran a modified
> OEM version of MS-DOS.

The original Apricot drives were 360K - _single sided_ 80 track. I guess
later machines had double-sided ones.

The original Apricot PC had an 8089 I/O coprocessor (a very fancy DMA
engine) in it, next to the 8086. I think this was dropped in the F1 (which
had no DMA at all), Dunno about the F2.

There was a TI sound chip, and standard-ish (not PC-standard, but
useable!) serial and printer ports. The video system was nothing short of
_strange_, though. There were also video cards that fitted into the
expansion slots that may have been more normal (I have no info on these).

The disk controller was Western Digital (some flavour of 279x I think),
and in many ways nicer than the Intel/NEC one used in PCs.

As to expansion cards, I've seen :
Internal Modem (300/300 and 1200/75 I think, using AM7910)
Colour Video (CGA-like?)
HiRes mono video (No idea)
Winchester (ST506, of course)
External Floppy (2 more 3.5" drives)
Network (No idea, but not Ethernet. Corvus something-or-other?)

I've also seen an ISA card (16 bit AT thing) that accepted an Apricot card
as a daughterboard and let you use the Apricot cards in a normal PC.


> Kai

> > - IBM Portable PC 5155

That's an XT + CGA in a portable case, as you doubtless know. I can
provide info on that if you need it (I have one, and the TechRefs)



--
-tony
ard12_at_eng.cam.ac.uk
The gates in my computer are AND,OR and NOT, not Bill
Received on Tue May 27 1997 - 18:20:58 BST

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