NeXT
Veteran Member
Was not expecting to tick two Apricot systems off the list with a few months in between. This is a machine I have been chasing for a long, long time.
I have not seen a Xen since 1994 or 1995. They were the workhorses at my father's previous engineering firm and by the mid-90's they were upgrading to then newer 486 and Pentium machines and I never saw another one in the wild. I have over the years seen them appear on ebay in various condition and completeness (and all with really bad prices) but when popped up two weeks ago for 55 quid I pulled the trigger and spent almost $300cad in shipping alone to get this thing to my door.
A Xen xi with an internal 5.25" floppy drive, a hard disk, the keyboard with the Microscreen LCD and the trackball mouse. The only thing that was missing was the page white display with the matching enclosure. The green monochrome screen was an option. There is also two batteries in the machine (a pair of 1.5v AA's and one 3.6v rechargeable Ni-CD) however neither had leaked seriously enough to cause any real damage. The only maintenance aside from a heavy cleaning was the power supply needed a recap. IT worked and it would POST but several of the larger 2200mfd caps on the secondary side had either begun to bulge or were leaking.
Actual product information is pretty sparse, seemingly referring either to the original Xen model or later models which used significantly different board layouts, ROM versions and PC compatibility. Likewise for a 286 system it predates the availability of Windows 2 and Windows/286 so it ships with Windows 1.03. While I did not receive any documentation with the machine or software, disk images to setup the machine and hard drive, plus factory restore the disk are available from ACTapricot's disk archive.
Still, there's mysteries afoot. Nobody really knows or can remember what the VOICE indicator was for. The Xentel telephone option didn't use it (that I've found yet). The computer could only dial numbers for you as part of the package. Curiously though the back of the keyboard is a 2.5mm TR jack. Inside the keyboard that routes through an LM251 op-amp and then disappears into the keyboard's PCB. Hanging around keyboard port on the machine there's a MIC jack which routes a wire three inches away to another part of the board with a MIC OUT header. You can see it on the motherboard photo above. It's well known that the Portable supported speech recognition but did they for some reason include it in the Xen? Never seen that in any of the sales literature.
I am by the way still hunting down more parts for these machines. There's a thread over here. Really if you have anything Apricot related I'm interested at this point due to rarity.
I have not seen a Xen since 1994 or 1995. They were the workhorses at my father's previous engineering firm and by the mid-90's they were upgrading to then newer 486 and Pentium machines and I never saw another one in the wild. I have over the years seen them appear on ebay in various condition and completeness (and all with really bad prices) but when popped up two weeks ago for 55 quid I pulled the trigger and spent almost $300cad in shipping alone to get this thing to my door.
A Xen xi with an internal 5.25" floppy drive, a hard disk, the keyboard with the Microscreen LCD and the trackball mouse. The only thing that was missing was the page white display with the matching enclosure. The green monochrome screen was an option. There is also two batteries in the machine (a pair of 1.5v AA's and one 3.6v rechargeable Ni-CD) however neither had leaked seriously enough to cause any real damage. The only maintenance aside from a heavy cleaning was the power supply needed a recap. IT worked and it would POST but several of the larger 2200mfd caps on the secondary side had either begun to bulge or were leaking.
Actual product information is pretty sparse, seemingly referring either to the original Xen model or later models which used significantly different board layouts, ROM versions and PC compatibility. Likewise for a 286 system it predates the availability of Windows 2 and Windows/286 so it ships with Windows 1.03. While I did not receive any documentation with the machine or software, disk images to setup the machine and hard drive, plus factory restore the disk are available from ACTapricot's disk archive.
Still, there's mysteries afoot. Nobody really knows or can remember what the VOICE indicator was for. The Xentel telephone option didn't use it (that I've found yet). The computer could only dial numbers for you as part of the package. Curiously though the back of the keyboard is a 2.5mm TR jack. Inside the keyboard that routes through an LM251 op-amp and then disappears into the keyboard's PCB. Hanging around keyboard port on the machine there's a MIC jack which routes a wire three inches away to another part of the board with a MIC OUT header. You can see it on the motherboard photo above. It's well known that the Portable supported speech recognition but did they for some reason include it in the Xen? Never seen that in any of the sales literature.
I am by the way still hunting down more parts for these machines. There's a thread over here. Really if you have anything Apricot related I'm interested at this point due to rarity.
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