The Enterprise 64 was a very long-awaited computer, two years between its announcement and its marketing! It changed its name a lot of times: its first name was Elan 64, then Flan, lastly Enterprise.
It has great features, which wasn't found on all other home computers, like its interfaces, great graphics and sounds capacities provided by two special custom chips called "Nick" and "Dave".
The BASIC Interpreter is supplied on a ROM cartridge and can be easily replaced with any other language. This BASIC is a very powerful structured basic with great graphic commands and can store several programs simultaneously in RAM.
It has a small word processing in ROM and up to 32 computers can be linked together.
But despite its great characteristics and all its interfaces, the Enterprise 64 was a flop in the marketplace.
Several months later, a new model was launched: the Enterprise 128, which was nothing more than an Enterprise 64 with 128 KB RAM.
Unsold stocks of these systems (nearly all :-)), were sold to East-Europeans countries, and especially Hungary where it met great success. Thus, most nowadays Enterprise activity comes from here.
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Kjetil T. Homme specifies:
The editing of the word processors was exploited during programming -- you could scroll up and down and edit the code with ease. You could hold down shift while moving the joystick to move by whole pages and quickly scan through the code. Contemporary computers required you to write LIST 100-200 so it fit on the current screen, and then you could move your cursor to edit those lines. The comparative ease of editing made the line numbers in BASIC much less of a hassle, which contributed to its higher level feel compared to other BASIC dialects.
EXDOS was the DOS which was in the ROM of the floppy disc adapter. It was sort of CP/M compatible, so you could run classics like WordStar and SuperCalc. It was surprisingly modern and used FAT12 as the filesystem, so I could easily transport files between my Enterprise and my Atari ST. I could even use the same DS/DD Cumana floppy drive, since it used a standard Shugart interface (the ST needed a converter cable to a DIN plug).
The RS432 serial interface could in theory handle greater speeds than RS232 (with which it is backwards compatible).
Andrew J King reports:
The Enterprise case was designed by UK product designer Geoff Hollington, subsequently more famous for his work for Herman Miller office furniture.
Please consider donating your old computer / videogame system to Old-Computers.com or one of our partners from anywhere in the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.).
Hi
I ve got one , if anyone want to buy , please contact me ENTERPRISE COMPUTERS 128K
sales5255@gmail.com
thanks
Wednesday 13rd November 2013
greg (Scotland)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v$zsjTpFR0oYQ
has anyone found a zx spectrum 128k full emulator that runs commercial software please