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