Down in the concrete jungle something stirred. The white heat of technology was warming up the echoing halls of Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre last week, as the 1984 Which Computer? Show got under way.

Sinclair Research wasn't there, so the QL remained a ghost at the feast. Sinclair Consultants of London NW9 was however doing a roaring trade explaining that quite a lot of people are actually called Sinclair.

There were launches aplenty, although not everyone pushed the boat out. PrisM went glossy to launch the Wren Micronetting portable and Topo the robot.

The Oric 2, hereafter referred to as the Atmos, also made its appearance, in the same week as the Oric 1 was done to death. The latter has gone out of production, but if you got one of the old ones for Christmas don't worry - Oric will trade it for an Atmos, complete with a ROM that works, for only £50. There may, however, be difficulty in getting your old programs to run on the new one.

The Oric disk drives, now due to be on sale next month, were tucked in one corner of the stand, having only arrived on the morning of the show. They're black and oblong and look nothing like the rather ergonomic 3" beasts that the ads showed slotting in pairs behind the now defunct Oric 1. An Oric spokeswoman had told PCN that they were in production towards the end of November, but as it was only decided that the drives would not have an integral power supply during December, they quite clearly could not have been.

The Show Guide says: "See for yourself why the Oric 1 was voted home computer of the year in France." Because we've stopped making it? Because we've stopped making it? Because there aren't any on the Oric stand? The mind boggles.

Back in the business mainstream, portables and IBMs were multiplying, with and without floating point arithmetic. Sanyo's sub-£1,000 IBM lookalike was there as was the NEC 8201 lap-held and the larger (strap-held?) Sharp PC5000 portable. With Sord also bidding in this area, there seems to be a new dictum in the micro stores - if you can't lift it, you won't shift it.

Everybody's doing it, although some are still doing it the Osborne way. The Prism Wren is a portable of around Hyperion size, the Apple stand was graced by a portable IIe, while Commodore's portable 64 was also at the show in force. All these machines have a tiny screen in common, and are likely to make eyestrain the watchword for 1984.

The Brother EP-44 printer/typewriter and the HR-5 printer (see next week's PCN for a review) were strong contenders for the cutesy of the show title.