Acorn Electron

The Acorn Electron was a low cost personal computer released in July 1983 as a budget alternative to the BBC Micro. A reported 300,000 orders were placed in the run up to Christmas that year, and it peaked as the third-best selling micro in the UK, with lifetime sales exceeding that of the BBC Micro.

The hardware of the BBC Micro was emulated by a single customized ULA chip designed by Acorn. It had feature limitations such as being unable to output more than one channel of sound where the BBC was capable of three-way polyphony and the inability to provide teletext mode. The machine architecture also imposed a substantial speed decrease on applications running from RAM, although ROM applications ran at the same speed.

Specification

• CPU : 6502A running at 0.5MHz to 2MHz
• RAM : 32Kb
• ROM : 32Kb

Graphics were similar to the BBC Micro, offering a set of graphic modes for different purposes. Missing was the BBC's Mode 7 'Teletext' mode.

Expansion

Unlike the BBC Micro, the Electron had an expansion bus on the rear of the machine. Acorn released a series of expansion units to provide some of the hardware capabilities of the BBC micro.

Electron Plus 1 added an Analogue port, a Printer Port and two general purpose cartridge slots on the top. The Plus 1 has a passthrough connector for the expansion bus, so that a Plus 2 or Plus 3 could be fitted at the same time.

Electron Plus 2

Electron Plus 3