Today it arrived, an Enterprise 64.
I didn't know about these home computers until two months ago and became aware of them in a forum post. So when an Enterprise 64 was offered on ebay, I tried my luck, even though it came from Egypt and I had no idea about the understanding of condition of a device nor the storage conditions in a notoriously quite hot country. And indeed I got the winning bid.
At first sight everything looked good. After I told the ZX forum about my Enterprise, they asked if I had also received the BASIC cartridge. Without it the Enterprise would be useless.
Background: The Enterprise starts without a BASIC or other language ROM cartridge only in a word processor. There is no language interpreter implemented in the Enterprise ROM.
But I got the all-clear right away, a BASIC cartridge was included in the package.
The package arrived, I unpacked it immediately 😀
With original packaging.
to be continued....
Hardware
CPU: Zilog Z80A
Speed: 4 MHz
Coprocessors: NICK (video), DAVE (sound).
RAM: Enterprise 64: - 64 kB (of which 50 kB available). Enterprise 128: 128 kB (of which only 64 kB are visible for BASIC and the rest for data / video etc.)
ROM: 32 kB (cartridge add-on extends it to 64 kB.)
Text mode: 40 x 24 / 80 x 32-28 / 84 x 64
Graphic mode: Eight graphic modes, max.: 672 x 512 (2 columns). The 672 x 512 mode was not available on the 64 kB model. The highest possible screen mode for the Enterprise 64 was still an impressive 672 x 256 for that time.
Colors:256 (displayable simultaneously in 180 x 80 mode).
History
Inspired by the success of the ZX Spectrum, in 1982 Locumals, a large trading company in Hong Kong, decided to develop its own home computer. In September 1982, Intelligent Software gets the order to develop such a computer. A month later, the top-secret project D.P.C. (Damp-Proof Course) was being tinkered with.
The inner workings of the calculator were outstanding for the time. Nick Toop developed the chip named after him, "Nick". This chip allowed a screen display that no other 8-bit home computer had. The second chip 'Dave', developed by Dave Woodfield, produced stereo sound and handled memory management for up to 4 Mbytes. For cost reasons, they used a membrane keyboard with plastic keys, a rubber mat in between (like the ZX Spectrum 48+) and the slower Z80A instead of the Z80B.
There was a small problem with the naming, "Samurai" was supposed to be the original production name, also as a reference that the main investors came from the Asian region, but this name was already
secured by Hitachi. "Oscar" was an interim solution. "Elan" was the next attempt, however there was then a lawsuit from the Elan Software company. In desperation, they came up with the name "Flan" because then they could just remove the lower dash of the E and not conflict with Elan Software. Finally, they named the computer "Enterprise". In Germany, the computer was sold under the name "Mephisto".
Although the machine was announced to the press in September 1983, and the machines were to go on sale in April 1984 - at that time about 80,000 machines had been pre-ordered - delivery did not take place until early 1985. At that time, the competitive environment for Enterprise was much worse. The Amiga 1000 and the Atari ST entered the market and offered 16bit processors.
After the bankruptcy, a large batch of unsold Enterprise 128s remained. About 20,000 were shipped to Hungary, where they were immediately sold out. Therefore, a very active community can still be found in Hungary today.