The Enterprise micro finally made it into the shops with just a week to spare before Christmas.

True to form, the micro that is 16 months old at birth lined up on the starting grid after last minute hiccups and false starts. Enterprise expected to have 3,000 machines in a selection of shops in secret locations on December 10. But by December 13 the distributor, Prism, still had nothing to distribute; Enterprise was talking about numbers closer to 300 and the shops turned out to be just round the corner from Enterprise's London HQ.

On December 14 the first reported retail sightings of the famous micro started to come in. Two retailers claimed to have a handful of machines each, and encouragingly for Enterprise one of them almost sold out over the weekend.

The next deadline for the company to watch come and go is mid-February, when it is due to hit full production.

We'll have a full Pro-Test of the Enterprise 64 in our next issue. Here by way of a trailer are some of our reviewer's comments on the micro that came in from the cold: "Sixteen months ago the Enterprise was probably the dream machine of just about every computer owners in the country. However, more than one year later, enthusiasm for the machine has dropped.

"Unfortunately the Enterprise offers the computer public nothing that hasn't been seen before.

"The Basic is extremely long-winded using phrases such as CLEAR SCREEN to erase the screen content. Surely it would have been much shorter to use the more common CLS. Nevertheless, it must be said that the use of these extended phrases does make any program that is written in Enterprise Basic much more readable than on any other machine."