Name: Epson Apex 100: A Budget Turbo XT PC from 1989
Uploaded: 2020-03-06T18:23:12.000Z
Duration: 11 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Greetings and welcome to an LGR computer thing!

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

And this time we’ve got another system that’s practically brand new,

This is the Apex 100 by Seiko Epson, a Turbo XT clone

that sold for $899 upon its introduction in the summer of 1989.

At least, that was the price for this base model with dual 360K floppy disk drives.

There was also an $1,199 version called the Apex 100/20,

which came with a single floppy drive and a 20 megabyte hard disk.

And of course, the monitor cost extra, with this 13” RGB color monitor priced at $299,

or there was a 12” monochrome monitor available for half that.

And go figure, Epson constantly offered bundles featuring their printers, cuz it’s Epson

But yeah, this particular system is here courtesy of an LGR viewer named Nick, who generously

donated this since it’d been sitting in storage for years, basically unused.

These Apex machines were Epson’s line of low-cost personal computers

meant for distribution through mass retail channels, starting in 1987.

Places like Montgomery Ward, Silo, Macy’s, Brendle’s, Kaufmann’s, Boscov’s.

Really, anywhere that wanted to sell a cheap IBM PC-compatible,

but didn’t have their own in-house brand.

What’s interesting to me is that the Apex series was intentionally made worse by Epson,

in terms of build quality and specifications, so as not to compete with their existing Equity PCs.

Those had been around since 1985, but Epson only sold Equitys through specialized computer

dealers, you couldn't buy them in a department store.

Yet Epson still wanted a piece of that wider retail action, so they introduced

the Apex series with specs that were always a step down from the Equity lineup.

For instance, the base model Apex only had an 8MHz CPU and 512 kilobytes of RAM, while

the base model Equity came with a 10MHz CPU and 640K RAM.

And whenever new Equity models came out, the old ones became the new Apex models.

So really, this 1989 Apex 100 we have here is internally the same as the Equity 1+ from 1987.

Heh, yeah this strategy of corporately-mandated suckage is fascinating.

Where a company purposely designs one of its products to be worse in order to make their

other products look better, then names it “Apex”

contrary to its position at the bottom of the totem pole.

That’s not to say I think the Apex 100 is a piece of crap though, not at all!

I actually really like this thing, both technically and visually.

Sure, it was slow even by 1989’s standards, but nowadays that slowness provides some desirable

characteristics in a retro PC-compatible.

Its 10 megahertz 8088-1 CPU was the de-facto choice on Turbo XT clones for a while, and

naturally there’s a spot for adding an 8087 math coprocessor alongside it.

Conventional memory is maxed out on-board at 640K, which is fortunate since actually

reaching that particular part of the mainboard is an absolute pain.

It also has a battery for both real time clock and CMOS settings, one that isn’t soldered

in so it can be replaced without much hassle.

And like the IBM XT, it features five 8-bit expansion slots, with only one of them populated

from the factory with the graphics card, more on that in a sec.

And overall I find the design of the case hugely appealing, with its dual cream-colored

5.25” disk drives, and this grilled section along the bottom that adds a bit of height

This also hides a couple of amusing little doors on the lower-right.

The left one here is where you’ll find the turbo switch,

swapping between 4.77 and 9.54 megahertz.

And these DIP switches control the keyboard and monitor types, number of disk drives,

No need to open up the system and look for switches inside like most XT clones.

And to the right of that is where you plug in the keyboard,

reminiscent of Radio Shack’s Tandy 1000 machines.

But check out this little detail, this is so cool.

The Apex 100 keyboard connector is designed in such a way that it only fits in one direction,

guiding the cord through this opening on the right so you can close the door behind it.

Not only that, but the back of the connector has a flip-out handle,

so you can easily remove the keyboard cable from its little cradle.

The thoughtful design continues on the keyboard itself, which is an 84-key board with a layout

mimicking the IBM AT Model F instead of the XT Model F.

It doesn’t feature the capacitive buckling springs of its IBM counterparts,

but it does use these white SMK inverse cross mount switches

using metal leaf contacts, with a tactile bump that’s satisfying in its own right.

I also quite like the way these angle adjustment legs work,

where you press down on the back half and pull upwards on the front,

Another useful design element is found on the right hand side of

the Apex 100 itself, with these two rubber pillars.

These exist so that you can orient the case vertically, standing it up on its side with

those rubber parts acting as feet, eliminating the need for a third party standing kit.

Around back is quite nice as well, with molded plastic around everything, reducing sharp

edges, and even plastic brackets covering the unused expansion slots.

As for ports there’s not a whole lot but it has what you need, like standard serial

and parallel ports below the power supply here.

What is impressive though is the graphics card, featuring a 9-pin video port and a 15-pin

gameport for joysticks, making for an unusual combo.

Then there’s this toggle switch here, labeled color and mono.

Epson called this their MGA card, or Multi-Graphics Adapter, being that it supports both RGB color

and TTL monochrome monitors, outputting CGA and Hercules graphics respectively.

Speaking of which, the RGB monitor itself is pretty awesome in its own right, with a

clean design matching the rest of the system

and an etched screen surface designed to reduce glare.

And around back you get some adjustment pots,

as well as this switch for color and monochrome, similar to the graphics card.

This is a color monitor, why’s it have a mono switch?

Well, lemme power everything on and I’ll show you!

Being that there’s no hard drive you do have to insert an MS-DOS boot disk on startup,

in this case an Epson OEM version of 3.20 that I’ve reproduced myself since the original

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Epson Apex 100: A Budget Turbo XT PC from 1989

eliminate

feature

mimic

bit