Our Rivals are Speechless: The Apricot Portable

Here's an advert for the Apricot Portable - the first portable computer anywhere to offer a speech recognition system, with a four-thousand word vocabulary and the ability understand accents "from Glasgow to Grosvenor Square".

It was also unusual in that all the components - keyboard, base unit and optional tracker-ball mouse - were connected to each other using infrared, like a TV remote control.

It was a portable in the sense at the time, which essentially meant it was light enough to carry around - although it still weighed in at 13 pounds, or 6kg. It had no batteries though and so still had to be plugged in. 

It was built around an Intel 8086 CPU and so could run either MS-DOS, or the alternative CP/M-86 operating system. It retailed for £1,695 - about [[1695|1984]] in [[now]].