Remember my mum nervously taking £200 cash to a computer shop in Bath before Christmas 1983 to get one (birthday + Christmas combined, and lots of jobs around the house, and I really need it for school...) and me asking her every day “has it arrived yet?” until mid February, when it actually did. I am now a prof working in computer modelling at the same university as Steve Furber and was totally star struck sitting opposite him in a boring meeting. Thanks Electron and thanks to the people that made it.
Was I was 8 I went to whs Smith and tried out a zx spectrum and instantly fell in love with it so the next day my dad went to work and came back with a zx81 that one of his work mates was going to throw away as he now had a ibm computer so my dad asked for it and I remember when my dad brought it back i was so happy and instantly started to read the zx81 basic coding book and then tried out a Copple of different codes and loved it so much
My grandmother bought me one of these when I was a kid in 1984. It's largely the reason I've been a software engineer for over 25 years. I still look back on this era with quite a bit of nostalgia. It was an exciting time.
Did you ever get as far as doing your own fp math in asy on the Electron? I wanted to, but had reached the limit of what I could teach myself. Started uni, but then the tech winds shifted elsewhere.
My Dad bought us a BBC Micro 32k. I remember copying Frogger out of a magazine. It was like alchemy. Years later ended up in video games for over 25 years. Worked with some great coders ;)
Aha, same here. My god father bought me a ZX81 and programming computers then became my life! After the ZX81, I had the ZX Spectrum, C64, BBC Micro and the last computer before a PC was the Amiga 600.
Oh man, this was my first computer. My best mate has the Sinclair at the time and was playing Commando, it was magical. I had just started work and one pay day, I went to Dixon's with my £45 pay check because they had an Electron computer on offer for £99.00. I was given credit and went home so scared of what my dad would say I hid it at my friends and told him to bring it across later. We had our first gaming night playing a racing game and of course the one and only Commando, what a time to be alive..
Very nice. The old Popular Computing Weekly mags brought back some Member Berries. I used to look forward to Thursdays just for these. Now it's just the day the bins get emptied.
I read this comment this morning, and realised immediately that I'd neglected to put my bins out. So thanks for that! Also, yes! The archive of magazines is so incredibly easy to get lost in. It doubles the production time for my videos.
I remember the Xmas that my brother and myself got a comador64 between us, we set it up about 6 am and it didn’t work, we were soooooo upset, a few days later it was taken back and an acorn electron came back, again we were sooooo upset !!! But after setting it up and it working things got better when I found games at the market for a quid, it lasted for years with a lot of abuse, lots of tea and coffee spilt over it coz the bit that took cartridges also held a mug( not an advertised feature) many hours of fun, f’ing great little machine, just none of my mates had one 2 borrow games from . One had a bbc micro so some games worked on the acorn, I remember sphinx adventure and mousetrap as two classics, thanks for the video you get a thumbs up off me !
An Acorn Electron was my first ever computer. I'm sure there were much better computers available, but I was five years old. The instruction manual with the BASIC instructions was enough entertainment for me. This particular school child probably did speak BBC Basic better than anything else ;-) Oh, and the Ferranti factory was not far from where I lived. They also made analogue electricity meters.
Thank you Steve! You were in the wave of users who kept the machine going well past its use by date. I'm still pretty amazed Sim City came out for it in 1991.
I bought the Acorn Electron in 1984, in Amsterdam, the German version, as cheap as a new Walkman. Box, Books, some compact cassettes by Acornsoft. great Basic system, i was not even a teen! thanks for selling them this cheap, that kids could by them using pocket money! My parents did not know what it was. I went to the UK every Holiday, to buy cassettes! the number #1 system in the UK.
Brilliant! We got one in 1985 & we bought 'Input' magazine to learn Basic and machine code. One of my friend's dads was a founder member of Texas instruments. I remember playing Sphynx Adventure, and my mum got hooked on Snapper!
Wow, I'm impressed with how well put together this is, I could imagine it on late night BBC2 as a little computer history lesson. It's a shame you haven't got more subscribers/views to match the content. You deserve them. Keep up the great work, I'm subscribing :)
Thanks for the mention (3:45) of the 6502 second processor - the "E2P". My company was Permanent Memory Systems back in the 80's. Great memories of exhibiting at Acorn User and Micro User Shows around the country. Keep up the good work!
Frak is much better on the Electron! No flicker at all! Repton is the smoothest scrolling of any boulderdash game on any 8 bit system! What a triumph!!
Christ, this takes me back! The Acorn Electron was the first computer I ever owned when I was like 5 or 6 years old. I hardly remember much about it now, except that it used to take *FOREVER* to load up games, but back then I accepted it. You had to, it was just how it was in those days. I can't even remember what games I had on it, but Repton definitely rung a bell with me. I know I played Chucky Egg too, but I'm pretty sure that was on the BBC at school. Grannys Garden was another I remember playing on the BBC. Those games look so simplistic now but back then you'd get so lost in these odd little worlds. Good times lol :)
Wow... excellent job. Only just came across this four years after it was published. And I thought I knew everything there was about the Electron! Owned one from the beginning together with the Plus 1 and 3 interfaces and a ton of games. Still have it all now. Had various programs published as listings in the Electron User magazine too. All played a huge part of my life in my mid to late teens. An incredible machine and would attribute it to my career in IT and interest in programming ever since. A great nostalgic trip... well done.
I wrote so many programs, many of them very good (some used by my school), lots of games too, but for reasons I cannot now fathom I never sent any of them to a magazine, quite bizarre.
I remember the BBC Micro at school. I remember thinking it was bollocks compared to my Spectrum 48k. And the teachers did not really know what to do with it.
@@ZXSpectrum128K I remember having a 2600 first. The spectrum was the affordable face of gaming. I must have been more of a spoilt bastard than I realised given the price of Atari games back then. Equivalent of about £80 now.
The Beeb is capable of extraordinary things, including games of course, but it's definitely a fair point that in schools many teachers were rather adrift, it was all kinda dumped on them with nowhere near enough preparation, plus of course for many the emergence of this tech was seen at a threat to their teaching role. At my school the headmaster tried to make them hard to access (he put the geography teacher in charge of them, a guy who did not like computers at all), though thankfully some of the teachers ignored the luddite management attitude, the business studies teacher being paricularly helpful. Where it really shone, beyond games I mean, was in its potential for robotics, external sensors & control, I/O, interfacing with electronics, etc. They became very heavily used for such things (one can find references in mags such as Electronics and Wireless World, popular for controlling home heating systems, garage doors, house security, all sorts) and as such *should* have been a relevant focus in schools, but again this couldn't happen without teachers who could teach relevant content, nor without the required accessory materials. It was an idea quite at odds with a top down, sluggish state edu system that couldn't adapt fast enough to properly exploit what was suddenly available. The experience of a student with these systems varied enormously, it depended entirely on location and the nature of the teachers & school management. I ended up writing quite a few programs for my school to use which certainly helped, though it's a pity there was no mechanism for such works to be shared among other schools. It never occured to me to send a copy to the govt edu dept. or local council, too young to think that bag (15 or so). I wrote a chemistry database, math program for teaching fractions for remedial classes and various other things, later focusing more on 3D graphics including solids modelling. I had an Electron but it wasn't hard to port to the Beebs at school, plus it was nice seeing them run quite a bit faster. :D I left school in '87 just as Arcs were gaining ground, but the school only had two of them so they may aswell have just been tech versions of the Mona Lisa given the degree to which getting access to them was absurdly difficult - kinda nuts given I knew more about how to use them than anyone else in the school at the time. Cest la vie. I went to uni, found a usually empty biology lab filled with two dozen Beebs and was happy. :D Re games btw, have to say, although I played Elite to death on my Electron and loved it to bits, likewise have it for the Beeb, Spectrum and many other machines, my favourite version is for the C64, it's just somehow better polished and visually tidy, with particularly good music (good old Sid).
Bought an Electron (@£125) when he was 5 and some years later it was the first computer my younger son experienced. Both of the lads went into highly successful careers in computer technologies (one of them gained a PhD and the other an ordinary degree). Seems a pretty good investment for a Christmas present... I enjoyed writing games on the Electron too :-)
My first ever computer :) I remember playing lots of games from Superior Software, loving it. But I felt a little left out at school, and eventually moved up to a C64 to get more popular games. The Electron will always hold a special memory for me though.
my dad got me one for christmas 83 i was 14 i have just purchased another one, i have such a soft spot for it, dont care what anyone says it was a better machine than any from Sinclair, i got laughed at school for having one, got told to either buy Spectrum or C64, i still loved mine
Acorn has had an immense influence on the development of computers, by laying the foundations of the ARM architecture. The 'A' in the acronym originally stood for Acorn.
@@markpenrice6253 ARM become a seperate company and now the A stands for Advanced infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.faqs/ka6746.html
Interesting thing to note on that MK14 diagram (backed up by looking at the actual manual) - it's one of the few machines that uses a PAL colourburst crystal for its system timing, rather than the much more commonly seen NTSC one. Which sort of makes sense, given the location. Presumably the NS SC/MP CPU could run happily at up to 5MHz, rather like the 8086, and in contrast to most other chips of the time (which tended to tap out at 4MHz at the absolute max, and more commonly 2.5MHz or less)... unless of course that was subdivided before reaching the processor. If only that idea had stuck we might have had slightly more performant 8-bit micros on this side of the pond, rather than generally slightly detuned ones which simply "nudged" the crystal's harmonic down to whatever the next closest PAL-compliant frequency was. Also, the BBC's video chips also had to run at 16MHz to produce 80-column / 640 pixel output, but the crucial difference is probably that the only piece which needed to do that and deal with the heat output and timing demands was the final output shift register, everything else could stay at the regular 2MHz up to that point. Whereas the high speed parts in the ULA had to sit right alongside the slow ones, building up heat and causing interference, and pass the 16MHz clock signal through rather more silicon to get there... it's rather odd that they chose to mess with the ULA voltage in order to fix it, I'd have thought a quicker and more effective solution would be to just bear the minimal cost of nixing the shift register from the ULA design and instead use an external generic 74-series part that could do the same job... even if it then had to feed its serialised output right back into the ULA itself. It might have helped fix any issues with the lower screen modes as well, all of which had to turn low frequency byte-wide information (or possibly nibble-wide, given the 4-bit memory, if they'd been smart?) into higher frequency lower bitwidth output - namely 8MHz for 320 pixel and 4MHz for 160 pixel... still the only part of the computer running faster than 2MHz, so easily separated into a small discrete area on the board with a single adjustable-output-width (1 to 4 bits) shift register IC and maybe a clock divider. Kind of like the turbo hack board, if they'd managed to segregate just that bit of memory somehow, but that does essentially mean having two different memory buses, and a whole extra set of chips, so it probably would have been rather more work and nowhere near as practical or able to be carried out with as much speed...
Watching a bulk lot of your video over the last few days. Really appreciate learning the history of all this! I've really enjoyed learning the business, marketing and technical movements that influenced everything. But mostly the personalities! It's amazing how small this scene was !
I used to love my Electron, my son and I really bonded as we typed games from magazines. I now have a high spec PC while he works in IT in the BBC. I think I may buy a reconditioned ELK just for the pleasure of having another one.
I actually owned one of these with the Plus 1 interface and 'Saisho' tape deck xD So many days wasted playing Repton and life of Repton on this. xD Best keyboard ever!
Strange that a machine primarily intended to compete in the home gaming market would voluntarily eliminate hardware scrolling. Sure, programmers found a way around it, but they shouldn't have had to. My younger brother had an Electron with Plus 1 interface, I had an Atari 800. It was telling that despite my computer having been designed in 1978, its graphics and sound capabilities blew away the Electron (and just about every other machine available then, with the exception of the C64 - and even that was only on a par with the Ataris, it wasn't significantly more powerful). Indeed, the 8-bit Ataris remained very capable gaming machines right up until the 16-bit revolution began.
My high school had one BBC, there were something like 2000 pupils. I laid my hands on it once for about five minutes in the whole time I was there, didn't learn anything.
Absaloutly made up when I opened this up Xmas morning in 1983, I was 8 years old. Boxer was loaded up and I was hooked. I'm 46 now and I'm sim racing on a PC, it all started that Xmas 😄
I remember taking a whole bunch of Acorn Electron games around my local 2nd hand shops back in 1992. Nobody wanted them. Cartridges were the new currency, and the console was king. I ended up throwing them out to the binman, along with a broken and overused Electron. The binman took the games, and tried to refurbish the Electron but couldn't. Weeks later he asked me what I had done to one of the Electrons keys(the key he couldn't fix). I told him it was the shoot key. I'd probably hit it over 50,000 times. I was also one of the last readers of the Electron magazine. Which was very much hobbyist based, unlike todays console magazines, which often feel quite dumb. The last 2 or 3 issues of Electron magazine were very sad for me. My machine was obsolete, it's joyous bleeps would never be appreciated again. Nice video. Couldn't help but notice the IBM announces "Peanut Junior" newspaper clip; how fitting.
I still have mine. It's sat a couple of feet away with it's Plus 1 securely screwed onto it. My parents got me the magazines to encourage me to learn to code. Something worked about that, as I became a software developer. All my friends got Spectrums and C64s and I eventually got a Spectrum + so I could swap games with them etc. As this video suggests, I remember my Electron (never ever ever heard anyone call it "The Elk") with great fondness. By contrast I had forgotten I even owned a Spectrum + until this video reminded me. That said, I have just tracked down the Spectrum + which was in a plastic bag. No, I never throw my computers away.
I stopped smoking 1.5 years ago, but I love watching that kinda stuff. Similarly watching Ashes to Ashes or whatever the other series was. Clouds of smoke and peeps choking. Having said that, these here hookas in bars make me want to vomit. Vaping, too, when an idiot has to pour out his own cloud. People smoking ciggies don't really annoy me, especially if they're roll-ups. Oh, and the BBC B was fabby. Never fancied an electron.
Awesome little machine. I absolutely loved mine, just got fed up of spending all day coding something in basic. Saving it to tape for it to never load again.
As a junior BBC, what a fine little home console. But what a shitty games machine to be the Spectrum's superior, with an overengineered keyboard and ULA achievement in the wrong machine, crippled sound and graphics and NO JOYSTICK PORT! For a machine at the C64's price level, that was dire.
Wow. We in France had only a glimpse of the existence of this machine which was barely sold here in 1983-1985, the local Thomson / Matra / Exelvision and foreign Amstrad / Commodore and Atari taking the reigns of the current market. Good work (as always), allowing us to rediscover a relatively unknown machine. Excellent editing and great content.
@@RetroDawn Both sold relatively well, but without any comparison with the Thomson line of machines (TO7, TO7/70, MO5...) well helped by the French government of the 80's. Matra was a nationalized giant (at the time) in other markets than computing and Exelvision an privately owned indie manufacturer. Matra showed very small interest in his machines (Alice / Alice 90): despite their quality, they were more or less Tandy clones. On the other hand, the Exel100 machine was ahead of its time (wireless keyboard, voice synthesis, etc.) but had a narrower financial "wingspan".
I had to pause the video when "Popular computing weekly" appeared. Loved getting that mag every week. Wow, how can I be so nostalgic? I'm a logical person! I had an Acorn.
My parents bought me an Acorn Electron even though I specifically asked for a Speccy "It's educational!" they said, I promptly failed all my "O" Levels, was a laughing stock at school and I have a rubbish job - In a parallel dimension I got my Speccy and I am a billionaire playboy... Like Iron-Man or Bat Man (I did love my old Electron tho in the end) - We never called it an "Elk" though, this is quite a modern phenomena to me (at least) from watching other nostalgia based channels (Chinnyvision)
Not sure one can connect the one with the other. :D I was bought an Electron, ended up knowing more about coding than anyone else at school, wrote programs the school used for its courses (eg. chemistry database, remedial math tuition), then I went to uni, got a degree in comp. sci., became very much involved in the game Doom, then the N64, SGIs, etc. Life I think is what we make it. ;) You're right about "Elk" though, I never called it that and neither did anyone I knew at the time. Likewise though, I don't recall people saying "Speccy" either. The only shortened name that was definitely in common use was Beeb (and later, "Arc").
Acorn, in their initial announcement press conference over 16 months before a single electron shipped, stated "the electron, or the Elk as our engineers have taken to calling it" The manual calls it "the elk" multiple times. Electron Users first cover was a cartoon of an Elk with the computer held between his antlers In other words - not only is it not modern but it came directly from Acorn and was frequently used in official materials.
I had an Electron with the Plus 1 Cartridge expansion attached, sadly over the years the machine gave up the ghost and completely stopped working. But that was the first machine i ever used to self-teach myself game programming.
When he said he wanted to make a 300.00 UK pound home computer would that be like having a $1000USD computer in todays money? I remember my father bought a 'Leading Edge model D' computer in 1985 and it cost over $3000.00 for just the CPU box and ran at 7MHz, so a computer that could be marketed at $999.99 (in today's $) would be revolutionary.
And furthermore consider what the £100 Sinclairs (and the £40 MK14!) themselves would have represented, in that kind of climate. They were stupidly cheap compared to almost anything else. The £300 mark was more like what the C64 and Atari 800 came in at.
With two currencies the answer's always going to depend on when you do the conversion, but £300 in 1984 is very close to £1,000 in 2020 money, and £1,000 today is almost $1,300. The pound was worth as much as $1.70 back in 2014 and, if memory serves, even more back in the '80s so if you had decided to switch your pounds into dollars before 2020 you might have ended up with a worse deal.
The Elk was my first ever computer, I was still using it up to about 1990 when I got an Atari ST (though I did have a C64 'loaned' to me by an uncle before that). I always thought Peter Scott's games were awesome, he really pushed the Elk to the limits.
I never had an electron, and by the time I was in secondary school, the a3020 Archimedes had taken over mostly from the BBC micro, though some still lingered on, mostly in the special needs teaching rooms, of course the art department had a Mac. At home though I had an oric followed by a msx, but we also had a pc from the xt onwards. Never had any Atari, commodore or Sinclair items however, except for a ql my father had and a stack of spectrums that my dad often would fix for school friends. Bizarrely, my father a few years ago found a electron boxed in the loft. I had no memory of him buying it however and the receipt was still with it showing it was bought in the 80s.
That was a great video NN! Congratulations, this charters the Acorn Electron, and indeed those strange BBC tie-in machines that we ALL got to know very well at school, in an extremely enjoyable way.
I never knew anyone with an Acorn computer, everyone had Commodores, Sinclairs and Amstrads. I remeber going to high school and seeing BBC Micros setup in business studies rooms, but I never ever got near a computer at school.
It's weird how your memories of what and when get jumbled. I remember most of this but somehow it's all in slightly different orders, like when Chuckie Egg came out or when your mate actually had a Electron.
When I was going to Maths tuition back in the late 90’s very early 2000’s all the computers we used were Acorn computers. That keyboard at 13:08 is the exact same keyboard we used.
My parents got one for me one Christmas , i remember finding it upstairs in the loft !!!, the smell of the electronics when opening the box priceless, my ULA fried and i ended up with no color out, remember having to get a new ula 30 quid!!!
I've always wanted this computer as a kid. I discovered it through Zophar's Domain as an emulator. Never hearing about the Acorn Electron growing up, I discovered it was a UK-only release. Sad.
I worked on a community programme that developed software for schools. The teachers would send their ideas in to our office by letter and we could pick a project from the list to develop. Microvitech gave us one of their touch screen add ons that fitted over the front of their cub Monitors. I wrote a few educational games for a local special needs school that had bought one of these add on touch screens. Thanks to that community programme and a subsequent JTS I worked on I now have over 30 years in the IT industry and my proudest achievement was writing those games as a 18 year old lad for the special needs school.
I believe the case was designed by Allen Boothroyd (who also did the Atom and 'Proton'/BBC Micro cases) IIRC that Break button was wired directly to the 6502's reset pin (certainly was on the BBC)...that always seemed a bit mad to me...
Back in the late 90's I met a fellow internship, he used to program games on his archimedes as a kid with his older brother selling them at 3 pounds each in UK markets, might even been featured in a small section in a magazine.
I bought an electron from an antique store a few years ago. Wrote a few basic programs and was shocked at how slow it was. How did people not smash the things to pieces waiting for stuff to load?
Another fine video from a top flight TH-camr- this video finally tipped the scales on the side of the Electron for me, so I bought one! TH-cam need to scrap the thumbs down- they really do. 7 dislikes?? Some people really need to take a long hard look at themselves.
I remember working at the Elektuur electronics magazine at the time they were developing the Slogger/Elektuur Turbo Board for the Electron. This little extension, using am 8 KB Static RAM chip and some logic to map the first 8 KB of RAM onto this chip instead of the main RAM really improved performance.
Here in the USA there never was a segment for these types of machines. The C64 dominated and there were plenty of people still using Atari 800 series machines. By the late 80s the IBM compatible crushed everything else. There were a few Atari ST and Amiga users out there but not enough to be considered worthwhile. By 1989 and 1990 the cheap 286 clones were everywhere. A 286 at 10 or 16Mhz with EGA graphics had so much more software than the other computers out there. When the 386 got cheaper and CDROM became standard it was over for everyone else
I know what you mean about the speed of the Electron, One of my favourite games was Boxer, and one day my aunt brought back the BBC-B from school (she was a teacher) and for kicks I tried to load Boxer on the BBC. It worked, but was so fast, it was unplayable.
Great documentary. Loved my electron. Keyboard was awesome. Elite was the 1st game I got addicted to. Went straight from zx81 to elk. Main reason was my A levels and school had BBC B on econet.
Great Video indeed and my first computer for Christmas 1985. I have many many fond memories of playing on the system and learning to play Chess. I smile when I think of my late Father telling me that he used to play Chess and Beach Head on my Electron when I'd gone to bed, Lol. Good times.
Just a point to note here: all popular BASICs at the time used tokenised keywords. Even though they were typed in full, they take a single byte in memory so in BBC BASIC, for example, the 5 characters of PRINT becomes a single byte (241).
My brother purchased his computer from Dixons in Dover in February 1986. Under £100, it became affordable. It did not come with a stand-alone Acorn recorder though. And Coke spilt on the keyboard did not do it good. To be fair, the Acorn, like all 8 Bit computers, was limited. Games were ok I guess. Now, there was the 16 bit Atari ST with the first ever GUI. But that was beyond the reach of most budgets of UK households at £750 per unit in mid-1985. Just too expensive! One thing you forgot to mention is the game "Citadel", it was awesome.....
I kinda mis my Electron. I had the matching tape deck and it was really nice to use overall. I had a Beeb B too. Very well built machines, and never a problem.
I was in school when the beebs were prevalent, not one of them ever had a fault.... but, that could have been cherry picking for the schools program, maybe there was a lesser "domestic" PSU for the commercial market. My beeb was given to me by a teacher a few years later, when the Archimedes had just been rolled out. I wish I still had it, it was even factory moulded with the boroughs initials on it from factory, they even bothered with the mottled finish inside the lettering.
My 'domestic' BBC made it 29 years, I'm sure its one of the VIA's, but it turned out cheaper to buy a replacement Master than a replacement (or spares machine for) another :-/
I thought the keyword function on the Electron WAS a memory saving feature. Command keywords were stored as single character tokens. In fact, when writing programs, you could use the single character token instead of typing the command. Hitting Function+Key was still quicker though.
I stormed into the stop with my Commodore 64 under my arm to tell the guy behind the counter that _'the damn thing he'd sold me wouldn't turn on'!_ Back then here in Olde Blighty _[UK]_ you had to fit your own plug, and I physically shrank at least two foot when having examined the unit, he announced before on lookers that I'd fitted the wires the wrong way round.
My brother brought one, and I kind of ....adopted it. Became the main user. Learned Basic on it. The power packs would give out, but we just got a multi voltage AC adapter and that worked. Wasn't perfect though and eventually the Acorn refused to boot with it. I always wanted the Spectrum though as my mates had a 48k, and another mate got the mighty Spectrum +2. So one birthday my brother gave me a brand new Spectrum +3, making me top dog in my group of mates.
Far be it from me to criticise the mighty Wilson/Fuller team but why oh why didn't they use 16kx4 DRAMs (TMS4416) instead of the 64kx1 DRAMs (TMS4164) - then the memory bandwidth problems would have been solved/never existed - seems like an artifial restriction designed in to differentiate the Elk from the Beeb ;) The ULA was the other cock-up on the Elk - just having to use the Ceramic package for the ULA meant a +$30 cost straight away which (more than) negated any possible saving of ULA a single large ULA in the first place - perhaps that decision was only bad in hindsight but two or three smaller ULAs would have been less trouble and ultimately less costly... And the other thing to do was, once they realised that the 640x256 of Mode 0 was going to be a problem - and that this problem would cause them to miss the 1983 Chistmas sales window - would be to just drop Mode 0 This would not be so bad as they could easily justify that anyone using the Elk would likely not care about this hi-res mode.... - since it's only 2 colour and therefore not much good for games ...
Had an acorn when I was a kid . Plugged into tv and we just typed characters on screen. One day somebody came around, plugged the tape drive in and loaded our games. We had no idea it was possible .
Hey NosNerd, greetings from Suffolk! I jus watched Micro Men (available on youtube) on your recommendation. Loved it, Alexander Armstrong was his usual great self. Cool stuff
Remember my mum nervously taking £200 cash to a computer shop in Bath before Christmas 1983 to get one (birthday + Christmas combined, and lots of jobs around the house, and I really need it for school...) and me asking her every day “has it arrived yet?” until mid February, when it actually did. I am now a prof working in computer modelling at the same university as Steve Furber and was totally star struck sitting opposite him in a boring meeting. Thanks Electron and thanks to the people that made it.
Thank your mum too for buying it for you.
What a great story. Thank you for sharing. 🥳
Was I was 8 I went to whs Smith and tried out a zx spectrum and instantly fell in love with it so the next day my dad went to work and came back with a zx81 that one of his work mates was going to throw away as he now had a ibm computer so my dad asked for it and I remember when my dad brought it back i was so happy and instantly started to read the zx81 basic coding book and then tried out a Copple of different codes and loved it so much
My grandmother bought me one of these when I was a kid in 1984. It's largely the reason I've been a software engineer for over 25 years. I still look back on this era with quite a bit of nostalgia. It was an exciting time.
Did you ever get as far as doing your own fp math in asy on the Electron? I wanted to, but had reached the limit of what I could teach myself. Started uni, but then the tech winds shifted elsewhere.
I'm ZX child. Almost the same age in software development.
My Dad bought us a BBC Micro 32k. I remember copying Frogger out of a magazine. It was like alchemy. Years later ended up in video games for over 25 years. Worked with some great coders ;)
Pray then the soul of you grandma... if today you got a nice living😃
Aha, same here. My god father bought me a ZX81 and programming computers then became my life! After the ZX81, I had the ZX Spectrum, C64, BBC Micro and the last computer before a PC was the Amiga 600.
Love your documentaries. Takes me back to my youth. Does make me smile when you pronounce BBC as Beby C though 😉
I was born in the US so learning about the UK's amazingly unique 8-bit scene is always interesting.
Oh man, this was my first computer. My best mate has the Sinclair at the time and was playing Commando, it was magical. I had just started work and one pay day, I went to Dixon's with my £45 pay check because they had an Electron computer on offer for £99.00. I was given credit and went home so scared of what my dad would say I hid it at my friends and told him to bring it across later. We had our first gaming night playing a racing game and of course the one and only Commando, what a time to be alive..
Very nice. The old Popular Computing Weekly mags brought back some Member Berries. I used to look forward to Thursdays just for these. Now it's just the day the bins get emptied.
Liam Goodison I don't think it's a typo..
logicone yeah, never heard that meme before, or seen that episode of South Park
I read this comment this morning, and realised immediately that I'd neglected to put my bins out. So thanks for that! Also, yes! The archive of magazines is so incredibly easy to get lost in. It doubles the production time for my videos.
Member Berries, haha.
Techmoan Hey...do all of my favorite TH-camrs watch each other? lgr nostalgia nerd Larry bundy jr you and the 8 bit guy
An excellent and information story! I got my Elk for Christmas in 1987 and I'm still using it every day!! Many thanks!
I remember the Xmas that my brother and myself got a comador64 between us, we set it up about 6 am and it didn’t work, we were soooooo upset, a few days later it was taken back and an acorn electron came back, again we were sooooo upset !!! But after setting it up and it working things got better when I found games at the market for a quid, it lasted for years with a lot of abuse, lots of tea and coffee spilt over it coz the bit that took cartridges also held a mug( not an advertised feature) many hours of fun, f’ing great little machine, just none of my mates had one 2 borrow games from . One had a bbc micro so some games worked on the acorn, I remember sphinx adventure and mousetrap as two classics, thanks for the video you get a thumbs up off me !
I had one of these when I was 6, on a black and white TV. I played Repton to absolute death! I loved Citadel as well.
An Acorn Electron was my first ever computer. I'm sure there were much better computers available, but I was five years old. The instruction manual with the BASIC instructions was enough entertainment for me.
This particular school child probably did speak BBC Basic better than anything else ;-)
Oh, and the Ferranti factory was not far from where I lived. They also made analogue electricity meters.
It was my first computer too. They came out the year I was born, so it's kind of my birth computer.
Bought mine in '86 and it remained my main gaming system till '91. Still got it.
Very enjoyable video :D
Thank you Steve! You were in the wave of users who kept the machine going well past its use by date. I'm still pretty amazed Sim City came out for it in 1991.
Steve Benway Excellent computer
I bought the Acorn Electron in 1984, in Amsterdam, the German version, as cheap as a new Walkman. Box, Books, some compact cassettes by Acornsoft.
great Basic system, i was not even a teen!
thanks for selling them this cheap, that kids could by them using pocket money! My parents did not know what it was.
I went to the UK every Holiday, to buy cassettes! the number #1 system in the UK.
Brilliant! We got one in 1985 & we bought 'Input' magazine to learn Basic and machine code. One of my friend's dads was a founder member of Texas instruments. I remember playing Sphynx Adventure, and my mum got hooked on Snapper!
of all things, I actually have to admit being blown away by seeing Simcity on this system. Thanks for this great video!
Wow, I'm impressed with how well put together this is, I could imagine it on late night BBC2 as a little computer history lesson. It's a shame you haven't got more subscribers/views to match the content. You deserve them. Keep up the great work, I'm subscribing :)
Thanks for the mention (3:45) of the 6502 second processor - the "E2P". My company was Permanent Memory Systems back in the 80's. Great memories of exhibiting at Acorn User and Micro User Shows around the country. Keep up the good work!
Frak is much better on the Electron! No flicker at all! Repton is the smoothest scrolling of any boulderdash game on any 8 bit system! What a triumph!!
Christ, this takes me back! The Acorn Electron was the first computer I ever owned when I was like 5 or 6 years old. I hardly remember much about it now, except that it used to take *FOREVER* to load up games, but back then I accepted it. You had to, it was just how it was in those days. I can't even remember what games I had on it, but Repton definitely rung a bell with me. I know I played Chucky Egg too, but I'm pretty sure that was on the BBC at school. Grannys Garden was another I remember playing on the BBC. Those games look so simplistic now but back then you'd get so lost in these odd little worlds. Good times lol :)
Steve Williamson, not Chris Curry devised the MK14, though Curry pushed for the production
Wow... excellent job. Only just came across this four years after it was published. And I thought I knew everything there was about the Electron! Owned one from the beginning together with the Plus 1 and 3 interfaces and a ton of games. Still have it all now. Had various programs published as listings in the Electron User magazine too. All played a huge part of my life in my mid to late teens. An incredible machine and would attribute it to my career in IT and interest in programming ever since. A great nostalgic trip... well done.
I wrote so many programs, many of them very good (some used by my school), lots of games too, but for reasons I cannot now fathom I never sent any of them to a magazine, quite bizarre.
I remember the BBC Micro at school. I remember thinking it was bollocks compared to my Spectrum 48k. And the teachers did not really know what to do with it.
@@ZXSpectrum128K I remember having a 2600 first. The spectrum was the affordable face of gaming. I must have been more of a spoilt bastard than I realised given the price of Atari games back then. Equivalent of about £80 now.
The Beeb is capable of extraordinary things, including games of course, but it's definitely a fair point that in schools many teachers were rather adrift, it was all kinda dumped on them with nowhere near enough preparation, plus of course for many the emergence of this tech was seen at a threat to their teaching role. At my school the headmaster tried to make them hard to access (he put the geography teacher in charge of them, a guy who did not like computers at all), though thankfully some of the teachers ignored the luddite management attitude, the business studies teacher being paricularly helpful.
Where it really shone, beyond games I mean, was in its potential for robotics, external sensors & control, I/O, interfacing with electronics, etc. They became very heavily used for such things (one can find references in mags such as Electronics and Wireless World, popular for controlling home heating systems, garage doors, house security, all sorts) and as such *should* have been a relevant focus in schools, but again this couldn't happen without teachers who could teach relevant content, nor without the required accessory materials. It was an idea quite at odds with a top down, sluggish state edu system that couldn't adapt fast enough to properly exploit what was suddenly available. The experience of a student with these systems varied enormously, it depended entirely on location and the nature of the teachers & school management.
I ended up writing quite a few programs for my school to use which certainly helped, though it's a pity there was no mechanism for such works to be shared among other schools. It never occured to me to send a copy to the govt edu dept. or local council, too young to think that bag (15 or so). I wrote a chemistry database, math program for teaching fractions for remedial classes and various other things, later focusing more on 3D graphics including solids modelling. I had an Electron but it wasn't hard to port to the Beebs at school, plus it was nice seeing them run quite a bit faster. :D
I left school in '87 just as Arcs were gaining ground, but the school only had two of them so they may aswell have just been tech versions of the Mona Lisa given the degree to which getting access to them was absurdly difficult - kinda nuts given I knew more about how to use them than anyone else in the school at the time. Cest la vie. I went to uni, found a usually empty biology lab filled with two dozen Beebs and was happy. :D
Re games btw, have to say, although I played Elite to death on my Electron and loved it to bits, likewise have it for the Beeb, Spectrum and many other machines, my favourite version is for the C64, it's just somehow better polished and visually tidy, with particularly good music (good old Sid).
Bought an Electron (@£125) when he was 5 and some years later it was the first computer my younger son experienced. Both of the lads went into highly successful careers in computer technologies (one of them gained a PhD and the other an ordinary degree). Seems a pretty good investment for a Christmas present... I enjoyed writing games on the Electron too :-)
4:59 'To all extents and purposes'!? That's not how that saying goes :P Still, good channel, good video :)
My first ever computer :) I remember playing lots of games from Superior Software, loving it. But I felt a little left out at school, and eventually moved up to a C64 to get more popular games. The Electron will always hold a special memory for me though.
my dad got me one for christmas 83 i was 14 i have just purchased another one, i have such a soft spot for it, dont care what anyone says it was a better machine than any from Sinclair, i got laughed at school for having one, got told to either buy Spectrum or C64, i still loved mine
Love your videos: nice work. You are doing much more than nostalgia: these are a great contribution to our common digital history. TY
One of my father’s friends worked for AB Electronics. Years later he gave me a prototype Acorn Communicator. How I wish I still had that!
Acorn has had an immense influence on the development of computers, by laying the foundations of the ARM architecture. The 'A' in the acronym originally stood for Acorn.
Doesn't it still? Acorn RISC Machine...?
@@markpenrice6253 ARM become a seperate company and now the A stands for Advanced
infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.faqs/ka6746.html
Interesting thing to note on that MK14 diagram (backed up by looking at the actual manual) - it's one of the few machines that uses a PAL colourburst crystal for its system timing, rather than the much more commonly seen NTSC one. Which sort of makes sense, given the location. Presumably the NS SC/MP CPU could run happily at up to 5MHz, rather like the 8086, and in contrast to most other chips of the time (which tended to tap out at 4MHz at the absolute max, and more commonly 2.5MHz or less)... unless of course that was subdivided before reaching the processor.
If only that idea had stuck we might have had slightly more performant 8-bit micros on this side of the pond, rather than generally slightly detuned ones which simply "nudged" the crystal's harmonic down to whatever the next closest PAL-compliant frequency was.
Also, the BBC's video chips also had to run at 16MHz to produce 80-column / 640 pixel output, but the crucial difference is probably that the only piece which needed to do that and deal with the heat output and timing demands was the final output shift register, everything else could stay at the regular 2MHz up to that point. Whereas the high speed parts in the ULA had to sit right alongside the slow ones, building up heat and causing interference, and pass the 16MHz clock signal through rather more silicon to get there... it's rather odd that they chose to mess with the ULA voltage in order to fix it, I'd have thought a quicker and more effective solution would be to just bear the minimal cost of nixing the shift register from the ULA design and instead use an external generic 74-series part that could do the same job... even if it then had to feed its serialised output right back into the ULA itself. It might have helped fix any issues with the lower screen modes as well, all of which had to turn low frequency byte-wide information (or possibly nibble-wide, given the 4-bit memory, if they'd been smart?) into higher frequency lower bitwidth output - namely 8MHz for 320 pixel and 4MHz for 160 pixel... still the only part of the computer running faster than 2MHz, so easily separated into a small discrete area on the board with a single adjustable-output-width (1 to 4 bits) shift register IC and maybe a clock divider.
Kind of like the turbo hack board, if they'd managed to segregate just that bit of memory somehow, but that does essentially mean having two different memory buses, and a whole extra set of chips, so it probably would have been rather more work and nowhere near as practical or able to be carried out with as much speed...
Well the 6502 ran at 1MHz so I'm assuming it was divided.
Watching a bulk lot of your video over the last few days. Really appreciate learning the history of all this! I've really enjoyed learning the business, marketing and technical movements that influenced everything. But mostly the personalities! It's amazing how small this scene was !
I used to love my Electron, my son and I really bonded as we typed games from magazines. I now have a high spec PC while he works in IT in the BBC. I think I may buy a reconditioned ELK just for the pleasure of having another one.
Actually I have just picked one up from Ebay minus Power adapter and leads that I have also sourced.I just could not resist it!!
I actually owned one of these with the Plus 1 interface and 'Saisho' tape deck xD So many days wasted playing Repton and life of Repton on this. xD Best keyboard ever!
The keyboard gave games a "solid" feel.
Salamander.
Strange that a machine primarily intended to compete in the home gaming market would voluntarily eliminate hardware scrolling. Sure, programmers found a way around it, but they shouldn't have had to.
My younger brother had an Electron with Plus 1 interface, I had an Atari 800. It was telling that despite my computer having been designed in 1978, its graphics and sound capabilities blew away the Electron (and just about every other machine available then, with the exception of the C64 - and even that was only on a par with the Ataris, it wasn't significantly more powerful). Indeed, the 8-bit Ataris remained very capable gaming machines right up until the 16-bit revolution began.
My high school had one BBC, there were something like 2000 pupils. I laid my hands on it once for about five minutes in the whole time I was there, didn't learn anything.
Absaloutly made up when I opened this up Xmas morning in 1983, I was 8 years old. Boxer was loaded up and I was hooked. I'm 46 now and I'm sim racing on a PC, it all started that Xmas 😄
I remember taking a whole bunch of Acorn Electron games around my local 2nd hand shops back in 1992. Nobody wanted them. Cartridges were the new currency, and the console was king. I ended up throwing them out to the binman, along with a broken and overused Electron.
The binman took the games, and tried to refurbish the Electron but couldn't. Weeks later he asked me what I had done to one of the Electrons keys(the key he couldn't fix). I told him it was the shoot key. I'd probably hit it over 50,000 times.
I was also one of the last readers of the Electron magazine. Which was very much hobbyist based, unlike todays console magazines, which often feel quite dumb. The last 2 or 3 issues of Electron magazine were very sad for me. My machine was obsolete, it's joyous bleeps would never be appreciated again.
Nice video. Couldn't help but notice the IBM announces "Peanut Junior" newspaper clip; how fitting.
I don’t always binge watch TH-cam videos, but when I do, I watch your channel
I had a SINCLAIR RADIONICS KIT which was a 40 experiment kit and the main transistors used was the MALLARD BC108
I still have mine. It's sat a couple of feet away with it's Plus 1 securely screwed onto it. My parents got me the magazines to encourage me to learn to code. Something worked about that, as I became a software developer. All my friends got Spectrums and C64s and I eventually got a Spectrum + so I could swap games with them etc. As this video suggests, I remember my Electron (never ever ever heard anyone call it "The Elk") with great fondness. By contrast I had forgotten I even owned a Spectrum + until this video reminded me. That said, I have just tracked down the Spectrum + which was in a plastic bag. No, I never throw my computers away.
18:24 - casually smoking whilst browsing in an electronics store. God bless the 80s!
That's a scene from The Micro Men, so maybe a little artistic licence!
I stopped smoking 1.5 years ago, but I love watching that kinda stuff. Similarly watching Ashes to Ashes or whatever the other series was. Clouds of smoke and peeps choking. Having said that, these here hookas in bars make me want to vomit. Vaping, too, when an idiot has to pour out his own cloud. People smoking ciggies don't really annoy me, especially if they're roll-ups. Oh, and the BBC B was fabby. Never fancied an electron.
@referral madness Trust me, life was MUCH easier back then. Compared to shit we have going on these days? I'd take cigarette smoke all day every day.
Awesome little machine. I absolutely loved mine, just got fed up of spending all day coding something in basic. Saving it to tape for it to never load again.
As a junior BBC, what a fine little home console. But what a shitty games machine to be the Spectrum's superior, with an overengineered keyboard and ULA achievement in the wrong machine, crippled sound and graphics and NO JOYSTICK PORT! For a machine at the C64's price level, that was dire.
Love this video. The A4000 was the first ever computer i used (at school AND in New Zealand), so i have a soft spot for all things Acorn. Thanks man!
Wow. We in France had only a glimpse of the existence of this machine which was barely sold here in 1983-1985, the local Thomson / Matra / Exelvision and foreign Amstrad / Commodore and Atari taking the reigns of the current market. Good work (as always), allowing us to rediscover a relatively unknown machine. Excellent editing and great content.
Did the Matra and Exelvision sell well?
@@RetroDawn Both sold relatively well, but without any comparison with the Thomson line of machines (TO7, TO7/70, MO5...) well helped by the French government of the 80's.
Matra was a nationalized giant (at the time) in other markets than computing and Exelvision an privately owned indie manufacturer. Matra showed very small interest in his machines (Alice / Alice 90): despite their quality, they were more or less Tandy clones. On the other hand, the Exel100 machine was ahead of its time (wireless keyboard, voice synthesis, etc.) but had a narrower financial "wingspan".
I had to pause the video when "Popular computing weekly" appeared. Loved getting that mag every week. Wow, how can I be so nostalgic? I'm a logical person! I had an Acorn.
My parents bought me an Acorn Electron even though I specifically asked for a Speccy "It's educational!" they said, I promptly failed all my "O" Levels, was a laughing stock at school and I have a rubbish job - In a parallel dimension I got my Speccy and I am a billionaire playboy... Like Iron-Man or Bat Man (I did love my old Electron tho in the end) - We never called it an "Elk" though, this is quite a modern phenomena to me (at least) from watching other nostalgia based channels (Chinnyvision)
Not sure one can connect the one with the other. :D I was bought an Electron, ended up knowing more about coding than anyone else at school, wrote programs the school used for its courses (eg. chemistry database, remedial math tuition), then I went to uni, got a degree in comp. sci., became very much involved in the game Doom, then the N64, SGIs, etc.
Life I think is what we make it. ;) You're right about "Elk" though, I never called it that and neither did anyone I knew at the time. Likewise though, I don't recall people saying "Speccy" either. The only shortened name that was definitely in common use was Beeb (and later, "Arc").
Acorn, in their initial announcement press conference over 16 months before a single electron shipped, stated "the electron, or the Elk as our engineers have taken to calling it"
The manual calls it "the elk" multiple times. Electron Users first cover was a cartoon of an Elk with the computer held between his antlers
In other words - not only is it not modern but it came directly from Acorn and was frequently used in official materials.
good to know, still don't like it! @@medes5597
My first computer/experience with programming!
Set me up well to kick ass on the BBC micro's at school.
I had an Electron with the Plus 1 Cartridge expansion attached, sadly over the years the machine gave up the ghost and completely stopped working. But that was the first machine i ever used to self-teach myself game programming.
Always nice to see these story videos on these 80s computers. Righteous work dude!
When he said he wanted to make a 300.00 UK pound home computer would that be like having a $1000USD computer in todays money? I remember my father bought a 'Leading Edge model D' computer in 1985 and it cost over $3000.00 for just the CPU box and ran at 7MHz, so a computer that could be marketed at $999.99 (in today's $) would be revolutionary.
And furthermore consider what the £100 Sinclairs (and the £40 MK14!) themselves would have represented, in that kind of climate. They were stupidly cheap compared to almost anything else. The £300 mark was more like what the C64 and Atari 800 came in at.
With two currencies the answer's always going to depend on when you do the conversion, but £300 in 1984 is very close to £1,000 in 2020 money, and £1,000 today is almost $1,300. The pound was worth as much as $1.70 back in 2014 and, if memory serves, even more back in the '80s so if you had decided to switch your pounds into dollars before 2020 you might have ended up with a worse deal.
The Elk was my first ever computer, I was still using it up to about 1990 when I got an Atari ST (though I did have a C64 'loaned' to me by an uncle before that). I always thought Peter Scott's games were awesome, he really pushed the Elk to the limits.
That acorn in the thumbnail was my very first computer before I got the Commodore 64. Great video fella
smoking inside the store, what a time to be alive :D
I never had an electron, and by the time I was in secondary school, the a3020 Archimedes had taken over mostly from the BBC micro, though some still lingered on, mostly in the special needs teaching rooms, of course the art department had a Mac.
At home though I had an oric followed by a msx, but we also had a pc from the xt onwards. Never had any Atari, commodore or Sinclair items however, except for a ql my father had and a stack of spectrums that my dad often would fix for school friends.
Bizarrely, my father a few years ago found a electron boxed in the loft. I had no memory of him buying it however and the receipt was still with it showing it was bought in the 80s.
That was a great video NN! Congratulations, this charters the Acorn Electron, and indeed those strange BBC tie-in machines that we ALL got to know very well at school, in an extremely enjoyable way.
A truly amazing machine that I sadly have not been able to physically find. Wrong side of the pond, and all that.
I never knew anyone with an Acorn computer, everyone had Commodores, Sinclairs and Amstrads. I remeber going to high school and seeing BBC Micros setup in business studies rooms, but I never ever got near a computer at school.
Same here, I only asked for an Electron due to Elite. So wanted to play it.
It's weird how your memories of what and when get jumbled. I remember most of this but somehow it's all in slightly different orders, like when Chuckie Egg came out or when your mate actually had a Electron.
Hi. Your videos are well assembled and edited. This video is therefore no exception. Fair play and keep up the great work.
When I was going to Maths tuition back in the late 90’s very early 2000’s all the computers we used were Acorn computers. That keyboard at 13:08 is the exact same keyboard we used.
My parents got one for me one Christmas , i remember finding it upstairs in the loft !!!, the smell of the electronics when opening the box priceless, my ULA fried and i ended up with no color out, remember having to get a new ula 30 quid!!!
I've always wanted this computer as a kid. I discovered it through Zophar's Domain as an emulator. Never hearing about the Acorn Electron growing up, I discovered it was a UK-only release. Sad.
I worked on a community programme that developed software for schools. The teachers would send their ideas in to our office by letter and we could pick a project from the list to develop. Microvitech gave us one of their touch screen add ons that fitted over the front of their cub Monitors. I wrote a few educational games for a local special needs school that had bought one of these add on touch screens. Thanks to that community programme and a subsequent JTS I worked on I now have over 30 years in the IT industry and my proudest achievement was writing those games as a 18 year old lad for the special needs school.
The very first episode of dilbert "The Name" is centered around naming a product. They settle on "acorn" with hilarious results.
Amazing cartoon loved the trash man
Wonderful video! So many memories
I believe the case was designed by Allen Boothroyd (who also did the Atom and 'Proton'/BBC Micro cases)
IIRC that Break button was wired directly to the 6502's reset pin (certainly was on the BBC)...that always seemed a bit mad to me...
Back in the late 90's I met a fellow internship, he used to program games on his archimedes as a kid with his older brother selling them at 3 pounds each in UK markets, might even been featured in a small section in a magazine.
I bought an electron from an antique store a few years ago. Wrote a few basic programs and was shocked at how slow it was. How did people not smash the things to pieces waiting for stuff to load?
The price of floppy disk drives back then meant that most people couldn't afford them. So you used tape and you got used to it.
Best Christmas ever was when I got my Elk - thanks for the memories
no one EVER called it an "Elk" not here in the UK anyway.. Leccy maybe ..but never Elk.
@@RobBob555 Yes actually that's true now you mention it.I always called it my Leccy back in those days.
Another fine video from a top flight TH-camr- this video finally tipped the scales on the side of the Electron for me, so I bought one! TH-cam need to scrap the thumbs down- they really do. 7 dislikes?? Some people really need to take a long hard look at themselves.
I remember working at the Elektuur electronics magazine at the time they were developing the Slogger/Elektuur Turbo Board for the Electron. This little extension, using am 8 KB Static RAM chip and some logic to map the first 8 KB of RAM onto this chip instead of the main RAM really improved performance.
Interesting video, however I do wish you would hold the first B in BBC just a little longer
@Fur Q The odd way he pronounces "BBC" - "Beh beh seh" - has been fascinating me throughout the video.
I really love your videos, this is three years later. Why can't you say BBC? What's bebaecae? Had you been at the dentist?
A fantastic homage to the humble Elk. Well done mate.
Here in the USA there never was a segment for these types of machines. The C64 dominated and there were plenty of people still using Atari 800 series machines. By the late 80s the IBM compatible crushed everything else. There were a few Atari ST and Amiga users out there but not enough to be considered worthwhile.
By 1989 and 1990 the cheap 286 clones were everywhere. A 286 at 10 or 16Mhz with EGA graphics had so much more software than the other computers out there. When the 386 got cheaper and CDROM became standard it was over for everyone else
I know what you mean about the speed of the Electron, One of my favourite games was Boxer, and one day my aunt brought back the BBC-B from school (she was a teacher) and for kicks I tried to load Boxer on the BBC. It worked, but was so fast, it was unplayable.
Such a professional episode! Thank you so much
You know Mk. is an abbreviation for Mark, right?
Great video, so much enjoyment :) Thanks so much for putting this together!
Great documentary. Loved my electron. Keyboard was awesome. Elite was the 1st game I got addicted to. Went straight from zx81 to elk. Main reason was my A levels and school had BBC B on econet.
Excellent work!
Got one for Christmas today! Still works!!!
Great Video indeed and my first computer for Christmas 1985. I have many many fond memories of playing on the system and learning to play Chess. I smile when I think of my late Father telling me that he used to play Chess and Beach Head on my Electron when I'd gone to bed, Lol. Good times.
Just a point to note here: all popular BASICs at the time used tokenised keywords. Even though they were typed in full, they take a single byte in memory so in BBC BASIC, for example, the 5 characters of PRINT becomes a single byte (241).
My brother purchased his computer from Dixons in Dover in February 1986. Under £100, it became affordable. It did not come with a stand-alone Acorn recorder though. And Coke spilt on the keyboard did not do it good. To be fair, the Acorn, like all 8 Bit computers, was limited. Games were ok I guess. Now, there was the 16 bit Atari ST with the first ever GUI. But that was beyond the reach of most budgets of UK households at £750 per unit in mid-1985. Just too expensive! One thing you forgot to mention is the game "Citadel", it was awesome.....
I kinda mis my Electron. I had the matching tape deck and it was really nice to use overall. I had a Beeb B too. Very well built machines, and never a problem.
I was in school when the beebs were prevalent, not one of them ever had a fault.... but, that could have been cherry picking for the schools program, maybe there was a lesser "domestic" PSU for the commercial market. My beeb was given to me by a teacher a few years later, when the Archimedes had just been rolled out. I wish I still had it, it was even factory moulded with the boroughs initials on it from factory, they even bothered with the mottled finish inside the lettering.
My 'domestic' BBC made it 29 years, I'm sure its one of the VIA's, but it turned out cheaper to buy a replacement Master than a replacement (or spares machine for) another :-/
I thought the keyword function on the Electron WAS a memory saving feature. Command keywords were stored as single character tokens. In fact, when writing programs, you could use the single character token instead of typing the command. Hitting Function+Key was still quicker though.
The note Braben left on the inside of the borrowed electron contains the secret to Raxxla!
Amazing stuff. And very thorough. I appreciate your work!
I stormed into the stop with my Commodore 64 under my arm to tell the guy behind the counter that _'the damn thing he'd sold me wouldn't turn on'!_ Back then here in Olde Blighty _[UK]_ you had to fit your own plug, and I physically shrank at least two foot when having examined the unit, he announced before on lookers that I'd fitted the wires the wrong way round.
Great video. I especially liked the old Woolworths and whsmith footage/tv ads.
My brother brought one, and I kind of ....adopted it. Became the main user. Learned Basic on it. The power packs would give out, but we just got a multi voltage AC adapter and that worked. Wasn't perfect though and eventually the Acorn refused to boot with it. I always wanted the Spectrum though as my mates had a 48k, and another mate got the mighty Spectrum +2. So one birthday my brother gave me a brand new Spectrum +3, making me top dog in my group of mates.
Far be it from me to criticise the mighty Wilson/Fuller team but why oh why didn't they use 16kx4 DRAMs (TMS4416) instead of the 64kx1 DRAMs (TMS4164)
- then the memory bandwidth problems would have been solved/never existed
- seems like an artifial restriction designed in to differentiate the Elk from the Beeb ;)
The ULA was the other cock-up on the Elk
- just having to use the Ceramic package for the ULA meant a +$30 cost straight away which (more than) negated any possible saving of ULA a single large ULA in the first place
- perhaps that decision was only bad in hindsight but two or three smaller ULAs would have been less trouble and ultimately less costly...
And the other thing to do was, once they realised that the 640x256 of Mode 0 was going to be a problem
- and that this problem would cause them to miss the 1983 Chistmas sales window
- would be to just drop Mode 0
This would not be so bad as they could easily justify that anyone using the Elk would likely not care about this hi-res mode....
- since it's only 2 colour and therefore not much good for games ...
Had an acorn when I was a kid . Plugged into tv and we just typed characters on screen. One day somebody came around, plugged the tape drive in and loaded our games. We had no idea it was possible .
Also FYI you did not need music over your voice while giving info . Info video not music video ;)
I like your videos, I watched several of them more than once, would like to see more documentary style videos from you
These techumentries are exceptionally good
Really enjoyed this one... Nearly swapped my C16 for an Electron when I was a kid but dad wouldn't let me.
Hey NosNerd, greetings from Suffolk!
I jus watched Micro Men (available on youtube) on your recommendation. Loved it, Alexander Armstrong was his usual great self. Cool stuff
Excellent video and computer. One of mine has the Plus 1 and Plus 3. The drive was single or double sided rather than density. Pob was Channel Four.
I've got an Elk up in the loft.
🤔Think I'll crack it open to see if it was that Elite machine..