Just for what it's worth, I tried to explain the context and the historical importance when I wrote about the original discovery of the tape, and about the recovery:
It's tragic this gets so little interest while the dismal Wayland is feted. Wayland is like DOS Edlin compared to Arcan: half-implemented, profoundly unambitious, poorly designed, poorly specified, and lacking any imagination.
It's tragic this gets so little interest while the dismal Wayland is feted. Wayland is like DOS Edlin compared to Arcan: half-implemented, profoundly unambitious, poorly designed, poorly specified, and lacking any imagination.
Superb. Excellent sleuthing and development, and well written-up too.
I supported a few Apricot machines in production in the late 1980s, and Sirius too, although I had forgotten the strange keyboard layout. It always was a better design than IBM's PC, or XT or AT come to that.
It had long seemed to me that if Apricot and the other non-PC-compatible DOS vendors had just been able to hang on in there until later in the Windows era than the fairly bad Windows 1 that they'd have suddenly had a much better chance. This work sort of serves as an existence proof: given Windows 2, an 8086-based Apricot is suddenly much more compatible with way more mainstream PC software than it was running DOS.
Apricot did survive, of course. The only SCO UNIX…
… a huge tower server on castors with a built-in UPS as well as 5.25" drive bays. Before we provisioned it with UNIX and deployed it at the customer's site, we put DOS and Castle Wolfenstein on it, and me and 2 colleagues played Wolftenstein while trundling it up and down a (very smooth) corridor. Its built-in UPS was beefy enough to drive a colour VGA monitor as well as the computer, so with the screen balanced on the system unit, 1 colleague rolled the server while another colleague rolled an office chair with the player sitting on it.
This machine showed Apricot again backing the wrong horse: it's the highest-end x86 IBM Microchannel machine I ever worked on.
… SCO Xenix was -- and for compatibility had to be -- built with MS C, not AT&T C. So every copy of every SCO OS meant SCO had to pay a lot of royalties.
Xfce uses labwc. It works very well although standard window-management keystrokes don't work. Apart from that, which is a bit of a deal-breaker for me, it's almost indistinguishable.
100% this. I had a Passport and it was one of the single lovelist phones I've ever had.
Compared to my Nokia 7710, the last device with the original Psion UI... that was an elegant touchscreen, plus physical buttons, and a replaceable battery, but that was about it.
Compared to my Nokia E90 Communicator...
The keyboard was even better; it charged off a standard MicroUSB port, and had a standard headphone jack; it had way more apps, because it ran Android ones pretty well.
Compared to any Android phone... Vastly unrecognisably better messaging app, with one inbox for all messages and notifications. Square screen so no fighting portrait vs. landscape. Physical keyboard for much more accurate typing -- and scrolling. Google-free.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/07/unix_fourth_edition_t...
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/23/unix_v4_tape_successf...
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