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Apricot - another lost British PC maker, which Sir John Harvey-Jones tried to save

We've lost the "Troubleshooter" - Sir John has died - and with him, a legend that touched the UK PC industry.
Sir John became powerful as chairman of chemicals group ICI; but he became famous on TV after his retirement, going into UK businesses and diagnosing their ills for the BBC series, Troubleshooter.

And while most people seem to remember his scornful approach to motor-car maker Morgan, my own memories are of working with him on the Apricot project.

"I'd never hire a senior manager who was born and brought up in Britain," he told me after we'd finished filming one day. "I'd always look for someone either born in, or who spent time working in the Far East or the Commonwealth."

That was his own background, of course; born in India, and spending 20 years in the Navy before joining ICI, where traditional English restraint and formality irritated him enormously. And after leaving ICI, he was a pioneer of a new brand of TV - in the footsteps of which we have things like Alan Sugar's "The Apprentice" and "Dragon's Den" - programmes where successful entrepreneurs try to prove that their success wasn't a fluke, and that they are generally smart.

Apricot, of course, was an apparent success at the time; Britain's biggest PC company, and one of the most innovative PC makers in the world. It was the first, for example, to adopt the radical new hard-cased 3.5 inch floppy diskette format invented by Sony and HP.

It grew out of software firm ACT, whose chairman shoved the missing "pri" and "o" letters into the Applied Computer Technology cryptonym, and produced a machine which was not IBM PC compatible. It ran MS Dos (and CP/M) and it was actually portable (sort of!) but its model was the Sirius machine pioneered by Chuck Peddle. And, like the Sirius (which ACT had imported) it failed for exactly that reason: by the time Sir John came onto the scene, it had started selling clones (as had Peddle!).

Eventually, Apricot was absorbed into Mitsubishi, where it vanished pretty much without trace.

The whole concept of PC cloning was a mystery to Sir John. I remember the programme we put together as fascinating because of some of the conversations he had with the Apricot board and in particular, Roger Foster, founder (seen walking out of a Board meeting castigating his fellow directors as being "unable to market their way out of a paper bag") but not remarkable because of the cogent advice Sir John gave to the company.

A pity, because one got the impression, several times, that if only Harvey-Jones could have understood the need for IBM compatibility, he might have been one of the few people to have seen a way around that stumbling block. And, if he had, who knows what Apricot might have achieved? It was, after all, a very successful computer builder before the need to run IBM software became overwhelming; and remained pretty successful for years afterwards.

Then again, it has to be admitted that Morgan Cars ignored everything he told them, and Morgan is still in business.

At the end of shooting, Sir John bought me a glass of wine in a very unimposing cafe, and sighed. "I really don't understand this technology business," he confessed. "All the things that make a big business successful seem to be missing, and yet they make money..."

It was great TV, and I think it introduced a generation of kids to the idea that business was worth taking seriously; but it would be a mistake to pretend it solved real problems.