As you may or may not be aware, the internet is well-stocked with users' personal reminiscences of their old 8bit micros; a fair proportion of which work in different sectors of the computing industry of today.

In January 2002, two rather intriguing articles appeared in the online magazine of www.silicon.com in a series entitled "Technologies Time Forgot". Both the original article and the responses it brought are reproduced in this EUG. Thanks are due to Dave M of Stairway to Hell for pointing them both out...

The Acorn Electron

BBC at school, Electron at home, arguments with Spectrum owners on the way home...

Following last week's look at the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, this week we consider one of its rivals in the UK home computing market almost twenty years ago, the Acorn Electron. Will Sturgeon takes a trip down memory lane...

1983. The New Romantics were topping the charts and 'old romantics' Roger Moore and Sean Connery were both playing 007. Roland Rat was everywhere you looked and Shergar was nowhere to be seen. But for this writer, 1983 was the year my first computer was launched - the Acorn Electron.

The Electron was the brainchild of Chris Curry and Herman Hauser - co-founders of Acorn in 1978.

By the early Eighties, Acorn was enjoying great success with the BBC B - the computer of choice for schools up and down the country - but Curry was a friend of Clive Sinclair, having worked for Sinclair research, and by 1983 he was eager to get his hands on his own slice of the home computing pie and emulate the burgeoning success of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

The Electron was designed to take the fundamentals of the BBC B and go head to head with the Spectrum in the 'under £200' market. As a result, many thought of it as the 'poor man's BBC' but in terms of design it outstripped its big brother - its smart and compact unit could not have been any smaller and still have kept its full size keyboard. Also in terms of power it matched the BBC B blow for blow (until a revamp of the BBC in 1984) - and all this for half the price! The Acorn Electron launched at £199 - the BBC Micro was still nearer £400.

As such the Electron was well received upon its launch but Acorn was not ready to meet the demand that ensued and a captive audience soon began looking elsewhere for their home computers. Curry's and Hauser's lack of management nous had been exposed.

A year later, Acorn decided to get its act together and went all out to recapture the initial interest in the Electron.

A relatively large marketing budget of £4m was spent reminding consumers of the Electron's many virtues and thousands of machines were assembled and stockpiled ready for the rush. In addition, boxes of components and cases lay in wait, ready to restock the shelves as fast as they were being emptied. Acorn was not about to mess this up.

But the rush never came and Acorn was left with a backlog of stock and the parts to make thousands of machines that nobody wanted.

The outcome of this to the home user was by and large negligible. While the Electron was clearly not going to dominate the market, its sales were only a disappointment in terms of the haughty expectations set for the unit.

It still sold in suitable quantities to ensure a steady stream of games were being produced, and with 1.79Mhz of poke under the beige plastic cover and a whole 32Kb of RAM to play with, it was a brave new world of possibilities - Hopper was about to eat Pong for breakfast (so to speak).

Simple programming in BBC Basic could be achieved through a cursory reading of the ring bound manual and within hours of starting to mess about with the language you could be writing your own mini-programs - though these were no more complex than flashing words, changing screens of colour or simple drawing commands to create shapes and patterns.

But for more ambitious programmers the scope was certainly there. Programming your own games was not beyond the home user - though there was always the soft option of buying a magazine with page long programs already written - you just had to perform the painstaking operation of typing them out.

Alternatively, you could just go to the shops and buy a game - or send off by mail order, as was more common.

As with other loading platforms the games came on a cassette tape and although the choice of connections meant loading games from virtually any tape player should have been effortless, this never quite proved the case. The inexact science of loading Electron games involved careful manipulation, on a trial and error basis, of the volume controls and frequent rewinding.

Yet the ten minute wait for a game to load was often more than justified. My own favourites were Repton and Citadel from Superior Software which took over Acornsoft - the platform's dedicated software firm - in the late Eighties. As the Electron slowly took off - or rather got slightly less unpopular - most games' developers added it to their list of catered-for platforms and the list of quality games available became pretty extensive towards the end of the Electron's stay in mainstream semi-popularity.

At a corporate level, there was probably a great deal of satisfaction gained by Curry and Hauser. The pair ran Acorn with no management experience and when the Electron was finally confined to the dusty confines of attics around the UK by the widespread uptake of infinitely more powerful home PCs and games consoles, Curry and Hauser were able to move on.

Acorn subsequently diversified. In 1990, its Acorn RISC Machines division, which had been making microprocessors, was spun off to help form ARM, not a FTSE 100 company, and in April 1999 Acorn was finally broken up, in a deal worth £270m.

Hermann Hauser was awarded a CBE in the last round of New Year's Honours - a belated gong, which I'd like to think was awarded for giving the whole world the Acorn Electron as much as his subsequent venture capital achievements. However, the fact that Clive Sinclair was knighted in a previous Honours List gives a pretty clear indication as to who won the home computing battle of the 1980s.