And one trend Mr. Foster failed to spot proved fatal: The rise of IBM-compatible computing. Apricot, which ran a version of Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system, had a hardware architecture peculiar to itself; it stuck to that even while the world's software designers were flocking to write IBM-only software. Somewhat grudgingly, Mr. Foster concedes being late in shifting to the IBM standard. "If we got the timing wrong, it was six to nine months, not a year," he says.