Hardware: The Acorn Electron - BBC Micros' Baby Brother

Whilst the BBC Micro was exceptionally popular in the educational market it didn't transfer to great home success. Acorn identified the price as being one of the reasons for this and released the cut down Electron to compete with Sinclair's Spectrum.

Some of the Elk demosceners

This is PlayUEF, we used this to load the games

Theme tune: Re-enthused by Onyapatto and Jonn Blanchard

[BMBI]

I still have mine in the loft with the Plus1 and a Cumana 5.25 floppy drive. Still worked last time I checked it (about 20 years ago). Cost £199 as opposed to the £399 for BBC B, which was serious money back in 1986

[aw]

Great video. Bandits at 3O'Clock was great fun in the two player mode, despite much of the game being written in BASIC. To my mind the one thing that Acorn got wrong with the Electron was skimping on the number of 64kbitx1 DRAM memory chips. If the machine had eight instead of four of these memory chips then it would have had both 64kBytes of RAM and an 8-bit wide memory bus to RAM. Acorn would have gone to market with a machine with a CPU that ran at more than twice the clock speed of the C64 across the whole of the memory map, as well as the machines existing strengths of having the BBC Micro's OS, BBC BASIC, 80 column text, and 320*256 and 640*256 video modes.

[meowgid]

You find some real gems! It's always amazing to see what you've found and/or worked on. Awesome video! 😍

[MrDustpile]

I had a hand-me-down Electron in the early-90s, which I slung not so long afterwards which I now wish I'd kept. I can play my old favourites like Snooker or Arcadians on my BBCs now but even given the absence of a joystick port, why did I think it was so bad that I had to chuck it????

I know it was choppy and lacked the best of the BBC's abilities for games, crippling it from the off, but I did have really really favourite games, I could pretend I had a real BBC as well as swap around software with the Beeb at school and I normally even back then kept old consoles. Well better in retrospect, eh. I just got bored of it as all I saw were its minuses.

Though no joystick port on the base model. No joystick port. The Spectrum could get away with that but not the machine which was supposed to be luxury, least on the entry level. Big irony in that I found most Electron games support joysticks anyway, while the majority of BBC games don't despite the nice big shiny socket for one on every machine. (What, did posh kids find joysticks downmarket??? They missed a treat, especially games best with silky smooth analogue control.)