Western Europe Apricot PC finished at last

[Ged]

Very late to the party here but I have some Apricots to dispose of if anyone is interested...

4 off Apricot PC/Xi system units:

Serial RAM Remarks

075021 512k Internal hard drive.
Booted fine on hard drive, ran for a minute or
two and then made a 'pop' noise and some smoke.
Even so it was still running, but I switched it off.
Probably an electrolytic capacitor, I don't have time
at present to investigate and I don't expect to have
time for the forseeable future. After this experience
I decided not to power up any of the other gear.

058826 768k No discs.
Expansion card for internal hard drive.
Expansion card for +256k RAM.

045432 512k No discs nor expansion cards.

030396 512k No discs nor expansion cards. Pegs for stowage of the
keyboard cable are missing - broken off, but apparently
no other damage to the case.

4 off keyboards:

Three are grey, one cream. The cream one is missing its battery compartment cover.
We never had a cream system unit so I can only guess that the keyboard was bought as a spare sometime.


3 off monitors:

Apricot 12" Grey. Originally came with one of the Xi's, working.

Apricot 9" Cream. Bought used, kept as a spare but never used, knob missing from what I take to be the brightness control (spindle present).

AP1200 (12") Bought as a spare at Auction. Indesit after-market, in original packaging with user guide and guarantee card!
Judging by its condition, presumably we never used it.

1 off hard disk/tape drive:

Quest Internation Computers 'Firefly' disk and tape system.

All the cases are in good condition except for the damage to s/n 030396 as noted above.

There's quite a bit of Apricot software on floppy discs too, although I don't know how readable it will all be. Some is backed up on HDD here, some not.

All in Derbyshire, England.

 

[zippysticks]

I'd be interested in the Sony floppy drive from any of these if you decide to part them up.

Thanks

 

[acorn_1401]

what is "Quest Internation Computers 'Firefly' disk and tape system."? I haven't heard of it before and can't find any pictures on google searches.

 

[Ged]

Sorry zippysticks and acorn_1401 for the late reply, didn't see any alert about your messages. Maybe because this part of the thread has been separated from the original. (Thanks, mod!)

zippysticks:

I have two Sony floppy drives on the bench. I have the service manual. I've recently bought a "Greaseweazle" and I plan to try them out with that when I get a minute. The Greaseweazle works fine with a relatively recent floppy drive. The author of the "Fluxengine" software has set up a branch on Github with a first stab at modifications which can read the Apricot filesystem and I've read some Apricot discs with it. I suspect the Sony drives aren't in the original Xi cases because they're not working. I have a few spare DSDD floppies which I can afford to destroy when I pluck up the courage to try it with the Sony drives...

acorn_1401:

Sorry also for the typo in my earlier message, that should read "Quest International Computers". Using the editor in this browser is a bit like scraping a blackboard with your fingernails.

This link shows something similar to what we used to use here. The Firefly systems we used were styled more like the Apricots however - grey plastic housings. As the flyer above shows, they were expansion units which connected to the Apricot system unit by means of a ribbon cable and an adapter card fitted into one of the Apricot's expansion slots.

My business started using the Apricot Xi around 1986. Originally we backed up to floppies, but the business was growing quickly and within a year or so that became unworkable just because of the time taken to feed in all the discs - never mind the risk of a bad sector trashing the entire backup, which was a single Zip file. Instead, I implemented a tape backup system using the Firefly products. The Firefly systems used the 60MByte DC cartridges from e.g. 3M and Dysan. I still have about 60 of those, and I've found about eight tape drives. I don't know why I collected so many, maybe I bought a job lot at an auction or something. In those days I bought a lot of kit from auctions, businesses were going bankrupt having just bought new computer kit all the time, and it was much cheaper than buying new kit when floppy discs were sixty pounds for a box of ten. I kid you not, that's what i was paying for Sony 3.5" floppies in 1986.

We backed up to tape every working day for many years. When we switched to PC we obviously had to switch the tape interface and software - that was a bit of a learning experience - but we carried on using the same tapes. The other day I found the manuals for the Firefly systems that we usede with the Apricots but I haven't photographed them yet. After posting my earlier message I found Yet Another Tape unit consisting of a housing, a tape drive, interface and power supply but without the MFM disc drive shown in the attached photo. It's half the width of the one in the photo but styled much the same.

Unfortunately some of the attached photos are very poor quality - please let me know if you'd like to see better ones.

 

[yottatsa]

Hi, I'm really interesting in dumping all the software from floppies and hard drives. Also, would like to get a tape drive and make it working.

I'm running a top-notch Apricot PC/Xi, with a pair of half-alive Rodimes RO352.