29 Aug
2006
29 Aug
'06
12:32 p.m.
I sent this one to Witchy the other day, but I think he's on holiday, so...
maybe there are other Enterprise experts on the list :)
Anyone know what Enterprise peripherals actually made it into production other
than the EXDOS interface? We've got a lot of marketing stuff with the machine
we were given the other day, and I've seen reference to expansion boxes,
memory modules, home security systems, graphics tablets, mice, speech
synthesisers.
I know the floppy drives themselves never existed outside of marketing mock-ups.
In fact, did the Enterprise-branded monitor even make it? Enterprise seemed
very good at making full-scale production-quality mock ups of vapourware, so
just the fact that it exists in posters doesn't mean much :)
It's one seriously cool machine though, and the specs are pretty darn good for
the time (way ahead of most other UK micros that were about) - it really
deserved to do better.
cheers
Jules
--
If you've ever wondered how you get triangles from a cow
You need buttermilk and cheese, and an equilateral chainsaw
30 Aug
30 Aug
3:29 p.m.
On 29/8/06 20:32, "Jules Richardson" <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:
I sent this one to Witchy the other day, but I think he's on holiday, so...
maybe there are other Enterprise experts on the list :)
Not on holiday, just on the end of an upgraded Demon ADSLMax connection so
it's up and down more often than a WinMe box in a west-facing wind.
Anyone know what Enterprise peripherals actually made
it into production other
than the EXDOS interface? We've got a lot of marketing stuff with the machine
we were given the other day, and I've seen reference to expansion boxes,
memory modules, home security systems, graphics tablets, mice, speech
synthesisers.
Strictly speaking, even the EXDOS interface wasn't properly released though
several got out. The only other peripheral would be the Speakeasy voice
synth though the mouse interface was there if you knew where to look for it.
Schematics for the expansion interface, 4mb memory module etc are in my
sweaty paws, all of the rest never happened unsurprisingly enough :)
I know the floppy drives themselves never existed
outside of marketing
mock-ups.
Not quite true, the 3" drives didn't exist but the 5.25" ones did but only
because the standard Enterprise disk interface was Shugart 410 compatible.
Even the hard drive interface I've got is standards compliant but only
because someone made it so :)
In fact, did the Enterprise-branded monitor even make
it? Enterprise seemed
Of course not, it was a Microvitec 653 as seen for the Sinclair QL et al;
you've seen my EP64 running on that very monitor at the 2005 CGE.
It's one seriously cool machine though, and the
specs are pretty darn good for
the time (way ahead of most other UK micros that were about) - it really
deserved to do better.
And it was solely designed in Cambridge and London :) The specs were
fantastic for the time, it was defeated because it was released over 2 years
after it was announced and was trounced by the similarly coloured
(coincidence?) Amstrad CPC464, a massively inferior machine but one that won
some of the hearts of the UK buying public despite the fact that most of its
games were direct ports of the Spectrum......
--
Adrian/Witchy
Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator
Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer
collection?
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julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk -
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