alt Hacker NewsI wish I'd been able to "acquire" one of the ACT Apricots that my dad's old work had. They were "portable" in the sense they had a handle very firmly attached, and I think the keyboard (which had a little strip of hotkeys with an LCD screen above - waaay ahead of you, Apple) clipped into the bottom of the unit.
The Apricot F1 was another cool one, about the size of a shoebox with a trackball rather than a mouse - when no-one else had any kind of pointing device!
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I don't know how many of these Apricot PCs I had as a kid. By the late eighties I was buying them for £1 a piece second hand as nobody wanted them (nobody could figure out why they didn't run PC software). I'd already had a couple of old Sirius 1 computers for a while, so I'd amassed a lot of "DOS compatible" programs that would work, and there was always the hope with every new PC you bought it would have some random new gem hidden on the HDD that you hadn't seen before.
The model I have is exactly like this, with a handle and a clip. You can still get one! :)
Why are the Shift and Caps Lock keys shaped like that ? Is it because those wide keys cannot be pressed from the ends ?