Apricot F1 and F1e
Description
The Apricot F1 was developed under the codename 'Rascal' and launched in 1984 priced at £1,145. It was was designed as a low cost version of the Apricot PC for home and small-business use.
As usual with Apricot, there was always something unique to make the machine stand out from the usual crowd of beige boxes.
The F1 keyboard used infra-red to communicate with the main system unit. A 9v battery was needed inside the keyboard to power it, and the black plastic panel on the front of the computer hid an IR sensor. For situations where direct line of sight between keyboard and computer wasn't possible, Apricot provided a 'light pipe' - a plastic fibre-optic cable that could be plugged into the keyboard and the PC. This light pipe worked well, but was very fragile and would break easily if the keyboard was pushed too hard against the front of the computer at the end of the day.
As with other Apricot models, the Real Time Clock was in the keyboard - The buttons on the keyboard included one that, when pressed, would transmit a date/time update to the computer.
While the F1 was certainly very compact, I always felt that the form factor didn't suit most working environments - sitting awkwardly on the desk and forcing the keyboard too close to the user for comfort. The keyboard was style-over-substance and not great for experienced touch-typists, many of whom were still getting used to the transition from electric typewriters.
The F1e was identical except for having just 128Kb of RAM and the use of a single-sided (720Kb) floppy drive instead of the double-sided unit in the F1. Originally priced at £795, it was largely ignored by dealers as offering too little margin to justify the effort of selling it, and barely sold 200 units. The price was then dropped to £595 in May 1985.
The F1 and F1e were discontinued at the end of 1985, but the F1 was then re-launched with an improved hardware specification (1Mb RAM) and running the Digital Research Gem graphical interface - priced at £999.
Photo Gallery
Hardware Specification
CPU
8086 @ 4.77 MHz
RAM
256Kb (128Kb F1e) expandable to 768Kb using expansion cards
Storage
3.5" Floppy disk drive (F1 : Double Sided, F1e : Single Sided)
Display
External Ports
RS-232 serial port - DB-25
Parallel Printer port - Centronics
Infra-red keyboard/mouse sensor
RGB and Composite video
Internal Expansion
1x Apricot expansion slot
External Expansion
A panel on the side of the unit could be removed to allow fitting of an expansion unit