[bboreham]

Amazing achievement.

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.

[roryirvine]

They switched focus to Windows around 1988, I believe - it was around the same time they started using the MCA bus (I believe they ended up as most successful non-IBM MCA vendor), so perhaps they had been convinced by the hype around Windows being a sort of interim OS/2?

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!

[nkali]

That's what I've heard, too! But apparently there even was an effort to port Windows 2.11 to XEN, though I have no idea whether it was ever completed.

[rjsw]

The initial Apricot model came with GSX, I don't think there was a GEM driver for the 800x400 screen.

[nkali]

There are two now; one from GEM 1.2 and one from FreeGEM.