Question from the Hungarian forum: what are feel the developer team when clear the Enterprise is unsuccesful in the UK market and finally when the companies collapsed?
I don't think it was clear to us that the Enterprise was not successful
until the collapse - it was very sudden. Bedford Square in London, where IS's offices were, is near Tottenham Court Road, which is the electronics centre of London - the street was lined with many shop selling hifi, computers etc. So we would walk to work at IS passing shops with the Enterprise in the Window - it was not clear to us that it was not doing well.
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It was of course a shock and sad, it was the end of an era, but the end of one era is the beginning of another, and it was an exciting time starting afresh at Madge Networks. I don't think I looked back much - too busy looking forwards! And I was still working on the TVC, so all the code we had written was not going to waste. We were pretty insulated from the fallout of Enterprise Computers. I suspect my colleagues working on the chess side of IS did not do so well, but we never heard from any of them again.
It was a bit of a worrying and difficult time for me personally too: just a few weeks earlier I had just taken out a loan, which I could hardly afford, to buy a house, and the possibility of finding myself out of work was very real! Robert Madge's mother's disused farm where we started out at Madge Networks was a 2 hour train and 1/2 hour walk from my new house, so I had to spend 5 hours a day travelling. I did that for a year before I could finally afford to buy a car, which cut my journey to 1 hour each way.
As I recall my overriding feeling at the time was just relief that I still had a way to pay my new house loan!
