December 27, 2025
Windows on an Apricot? Juice spilled
Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi
Retro internet loses it as Windows 2 boots on a forgotten British Apricot
TLDR: A dev ported Windows 2 to the non‑IBM Apricot PC after 2.5 years, letting this 1980s oddball run real apps. Comments erupted with nostalgia, GEM-vs-Windows debates, Tandy bragging, and piracy confessions—plus a fan club telling everyone to follow Nina—showing how preserving weird old tech still fires people up.
A retro-computing hero just made Windows 2 run on an Apricot PC—a stylish 1980s British computer that wasn’t compatible with IBM’s standard—and the comments section instantly turned into a nostalgia-fueled street fight. Dev superstar Nina spent two and a half years making the impossible happen so this quirky relic can now run Word and Excel. The crowd? Equal parts awe, bragging rights, and cheeky confessions. One old-schooler flexed that their Tandy 2000 already did Windows 1 “back in the day,” while another admitted to using a “(pirated) Windows 2 runtime” in the late ’80s. The Apricot’s design got love too—someone swore its keyboard’s little LCD hotkey strip was “waaay ahead of Apple.”
Then came the drama: an ex-Apricot insider chimed in that the company leaned on GEM (another old desktop system) more than Windows, poking the bears of the “Windows won vs. could-have-beens” debate. Meanwhile, fans rallied around Nina, with a chorus of “follow her on Mastodon” and links to the project on sr.ht. In simple terms: a rare computer with a tiny software library just scored a massive glow-up, and retro nerds are celebrating, arguing, and dropping museum-piece memes. It’s equal parts history lesson, hacker flex, and vintage soap opera—exactly the kind of chaos the internet lives for.
Key Points
- •A working port of Windows 2 to the Apricot PC/Xi was achieved after two and a half years.
- •The Apricot PC/Xi uses an Intel 8086, features 3.5-inch floppy drives, and the PC/Xi model includes a 10 MB Rodime RO352 hard drive.
- •The Apricot runs MS-DOS 2.0–3.20 but is not IBM PC-compatible, resulting in a small software catalog and limited GUI applications.
- •Windows 1’s preserved Apricot port (1987) and similar driver architecture to Windows 2 enabled the porting effort.
- •Windows setup links drivers with the kernel into WIN100.BIN and WIN100.OVL (“fast boot”), complicating access to separate driver files.