Enterprise 64

The Enterprise was one of British computing's great might-have-beens. Announced back in 1983 with genuinely advanced custom hardware and a sleek, futuristic wedge of a case complete with a built-in joystick, it promised to leave the established competition trailing in its wake.

Then came the delays. A catalogue of problems meant the machine didn't actually reach buyers until 1985, by which point the world had moved on and its moment had quietly passed. The hardware was still clever, but cleverness counts for little when rivals are entrenched and the cutting edge has shifted somewhere else.

For all its sophistication, the Enterprise never really boldly went anywhere, and it slipped away without making the splash it deserved. It survives as a textbook example of brilliant engineering undone by poor timing, the kind of ambitious British machine that arrived just a little too late to change anything.