Has Apricot gone bananas?

Launched in 1984, ACT's Apricot F1 was a follow-up to 1983's Apricot PC - a machine which featured compatibility with Chuck Peddle's Sirius 1, which ACT had a lot success with as an importer, shifting some 25,000 machines in the UK alone.

Unlike the earlier machine, the F1 was aimed more at home users as well as perhaps small businesses, shipping with the ability to plug in to a television and using infra-red to connect its keyboard and mouse - making it possible to use from a sofa several metres away, as long as the user had a pair of binoculars handy in order to see the screen.

The F1 - like the Apricot before it - was designed and built in the UK, with only components not made locally being the integrated circuits like the Intel 8086 CPU. 

It was also the first "all in one" microcomputer to use Sony's new 3½" floppy disk drive[source: https://oldcomputers.net/apricot-f1.html] - the format that would become dominant until floppy disks were effectively replaced by portable storage based on flash memory at the very end of the 20th century.

And whilst it ran MS-DOS, it wasn't actually IBM compatible, although it was sometimes referred to as a "British [=us_mag_1984_07_00_pcjr|PCjr]", in reference to IBM's flawed attempt at the home market.

Reflecting its target market, the F1 was quite cheap, retailing for only £1,095 plus VAT, which is around [[1260|1985]] in [[now]], although that's without a monitor.