13 Jun
2010
13 Jun
'10
2:40 p.m.
On 13 Jun 2010 at 15:26, Richard wrote:
I worked at a small retailer that (unfortunately)
chose the Apricot
line as their primary line. We had the smaller F1s and the larger
Xis. Nice ideas on the keyboard, unfortunately they were not BIOS
compatible and that killed them as most applications at that time went
straight to the BIOS and not through the MS-DOS layer. They were
MS-DOS compatible but not BIOS compatible.
At least one "PC incompatible" provided a terminate-and-stay-resident
DOS program that translated PC BIOS calls to the native system's
BIOS. I'm not sure that it did much better as regards compatibility--
there were a lot of programs that did direct-memory-and-port-access
video and a fair number of games that resorted to twiddling the
floppy controller to implement their own copy protection. "Don't
floppy that copy!"
--Chuck