Inventory Tetris

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

After Acorn Computers released the BBC Micro, executives believed that the company needed a less expensive computer for the mass market. In May 1982, when asked about the recently announced Sinclair ZX Spectrum's potential to hurt sales of the BBC Micro, priced at £125 for the 16K model compared to around twice that price for the 16K BBC Model A, Acorn co-founder Hermann Hauser responded that in the third quarter of that year Acorn would release a new £120–150 computer which 'will probably be called the Electron', a form of 'miniaturised BBC Micro', having 32 KB of RAM and 32 KB of ROM, with 'higher resolution graphics than those offered by the Spectrum'. Acorn co-founder Chris Curry also emphasised the Electron's role as being 'designed to compete with the Spectrum... to get the starting price very low, but not preclude expansion in the long term.'

In Their Own Story

Production difficulties at Astec in Malaysia delayed the machine's introduction, forcing Acorn to look to other manufacturers such as AB Electronics in Wales and Wongs in Hong Kong (an original equipment manufacturer making over 30 million circuit boards a year, along with power supplies and plastic housings, for companies such as IBM, Xerox, Atari, and Apple, including units made for Acorn for the BBC Micro). By the time the Electron was launched at the Acorn User Exhibition in August 1983, the company expected to ship before Christmas and sell 100,000 by February 1984. The price at launch – £199 – remained unchanged from that stated in an announcement earlier in the year.

Reader's Guide

The Electron is able to save and load programs onto audio cassette via a cable, originally supplied with the computer, connecting it to any standard tape recorder with the appropriate sockets. It is capable of bitmapped graphics, and can use either a contemporary television set, a colour (RGB) monitor or a monochrome monitor as its display. Several expansions were made available to provide many of the capabilities omitted from the BBC Micro. Acorn introduced a general-purpose expansion unit, the Plus 1, offering analogue joystick and parallel ports, together with cartridge slots into which ROM cartridges, providing software, or other kinds of hardware expansions, such as disc interfaces, could be inserted. Acorn also produced a dedicated disc expansion, the Plus 3, featuring a disc controller and 3.5-inch floppy drive. For a short period, the Electron was reportedly the best selling micro in the United Kingdom, with an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 machines sold over its entire commercial lifespan.

Did You Know?

• The Electron's nickname inside Acorn was the 'Elk'.
• The machine uses a single 2,400-gate Uncommitted Logic Array (ULA) to reduce the chip count from 102 on the BBC Micro to 'something like 12 to 14 chips'.
• The operating system ROM includes a credits message thanking contributors including '6502 designers' and 'Computer Laboratory'.
• The case was designed by industrial designer Allen Boothroyd of Cambridge Product Design.
• The last bytes of both the BASIC ROM and the Plus 3 interface's ADFS v1.0 ROM include the word 'Roger', thought to be a reference to Roger Wilson.