Okay - looking for our most distant Electron - i.e. the one that made it the furthest from the UK :) Any takers?

I drooled over this for months, thinking the BBC was out of our price-range. I even wrote out many programs from magazines into a single notebook. Then my lovely parents surprised me with a BBC B instead! Such happy memories of the early days of computers.

I had an Electron which was the next step on from the Vic-20 i had. i remember my parents had to wait months for it to come in via dixons. When it did finally arrive, it was a little bit dirty and it kept going off. Turns out they had sent us a shop demo unit and the power barrel jack was knackered. So at the age of 12 i removed the power board and soldered on a new power jack. I think it was the first electronics repair i ever did. My parents were well impressed at the time.

I did indeed have an Electron, it was my first real computer. I think I spent the whole of Christmas the year I got it typing out things from the user manual and watching the stars go by in Elite.

I loved my Electron. It even had a crazy 'Turbo mode' toggle switch on the side.

I owned and Electron (first) and a BBC model B (much later), and did a lot of programming on both. there were 3 main things they got technically wrong with the Electron as a result of building down to a price. 1. Sound. They dumped the 4 channel sound chip from the beeb and replaced with single channel sound. 2. Lack of mode 7 graphics. In the beeb this was the teletext compatible display mode that only took 1k for the display. 3. speed. The electron was half the speed of the beeb because half the cpu cycles were used for refreshing the ram. And it did not properly support hardware scrolling. This made writing fast games more of a challenge.. Having said all that, the electron was an absolute joy to learn programming on. The keyboard was probably the best on any home computer, the Acorn OS / Basic encouraged good programming technique and it had a built in 6502 compiler, and this is where you really learnt how to be a programmer. Overall I loved my electron despite the hardware limitations compared with the beeb and spent many many hours after school programming it.

I was a Specturm owner, but did envy my friend Martin's Acorn Electron, I loved playing Elite on it :-)

Yes! I grew up with an Electron, writing code in Basic. Now, 35 years later I am a PHP developer - thank you Acorn.

I bought an ex-display unit for my second year at uni - the BBC was the graphics micro in the Computer Lab (as well as the one used for sensor reading), so being able to do much of the Computer Graphics I & II module assignments in halls, and take in a tape to load to BBC for demoing and printing was great.

ZX81 -> Electron -> ST -> PC -> IT Career was my route. Loved that keyboard but always envious of the kid with the cashed up parents and the BBC B down the road ...

I've just watched this video after 2 years it was posted. Thanks for the video.

I remember getting an Electron for Christmas in the 80's. After the initial excitement it died down when a trip to WHSmiths or another computer shop showed how few games it had compared to the others like the sinclairs and commodores. I remember wishingly looking at the titles, hoping, just hoping to find something I played on the speccy that had an electron sticker on it. Sadly that hardly occured.

My first "real" computer and the one that gave rise to an obsession with collecting games...! I haven't bought a lot of the more recent hardware expansions and am really looking forward to your promised follow-up. Maybe you could even give EUG (the Electron User Group) a mention? I used to edit that magazine for many years.

It's amazing that most retro channels cover the Electron and BBC series of micos, but fail to mention the Acorn Atom that came in both ready built and kit form, as direct competition to the ZX81, which again could be purchased in kit form for £20 less than ready built from WH Smiths. Both these help boost my small income as an apprentice at British Aerospace as I would buy and assemble the kit form and then sell them for £10 less than the ready assembled offerings. The Atom was an amazing bit of kit, with its "hi res" graphics and real keyboard

Smashing video RetroShack! Love your style and very informative! 😎👍

Got mine for Xmas '85 and used it faithfully until it went 'pop' in 1992 and I graduated to the Amiga. I remember being gutted however when I found out 90% of my ZX owning best mate's games weren't available for it!. But I do recall growing ever-fonder of the games that WERE available for it from companies like Superior Software over the years (Exile was a beast!), and feeling that they were on average a much better quality than much of the dirge available on other systems. This is quite timely actually as, having recently purchased/restored a ZX Spectrum (I finally own one!) and revived my old Amiga, I found myself sifting through eBay reminiscing and lamenting the fact my late-mother had chucked my old broken Elk 20+ years previously. To my surprise however, rooting through the attic of her house whilst clearing it only last weekend I actually bloody found it...she hadn't chucked it after all! Been tinkering all week and was overjoyed when it creaked back into life only last night! 29 years later it breathes again! Still need to recap/retrobright it over the next few weeks though, and get some sort of SD card system in place, so work still to be done. However my 8 year old son (same age I was when I got it!) can't wait to learn all about it...even though he's already been disappointed about the games situation like I was. "Can I play Minecraft & Super Mario Odyssey on it?" Erm...no son...sorry...but we can play Starship Command & Paperboy if you like!!

You just got yourself another subscriber. Can't wait to dip into this candy store. Great video!

I from Tucson AZ and never heard of Acorn until recently. I never researched the origins of the Arm processor until last year. Sinclair's Spectrum and the C64 were well known in the US , but Acorn was almost ingnored but most of the computer magazines that I read.

I’m up to 6:07, but would like to clarify that no DISC or ADFS filing system exists within the Electron. Whatever disc add on one chose brought that with it. The main failure in my Electrons back when I were a wee nipper revolved around the 3M socket the ULA was in. The ULAs from Ferranti running stupendously 🥵

just found your channel (and subscribed) enjoying the content so far......keep up the good work!!

One of other things missing from the Electron was any form of joystick port. This was a shortcoming for the ZX Spectrum as well however when compared to the VIC-20 and, in particular the C64, which came with such ports as standard it was another tought point in the early games market comparisons. Both the VIC-20 and C64 came with bundles that included a joystick and while the ZX Spectrum was a bit blighted by a few varieties of joystick interfaces, they were cheap and readily available.

I owed my first career to the model B. My parents sacrificed a lot to get one of the first. I've had countless computers since that have long gone but I still have my Model B and it still works. Thank you Acorn.

"What if" captures a lot of the computing market in the 80'ths.. :P

These are lovely old machines. Well made and in my opinion underrated. I have a few including an issue 2 with a double start up beep same as the BBC micro. Nice review thanks for making.

That took me back to the early / mid 80's....thanks for the video and the comparisons.... I had this (£199) and firstly I bought the Plus 1 Joystick and ROM interface (For around £60 as you say) then later I bought the Plus 3, this was an L shaped device that wrapped around the Electron. You had to take off the Plus 1 first and re-attach it behind the Plus 3. The Plus 3 was a 3.5 inch floppy disk drive, (Single sided, single density) cost a whopping £200 but it really made loading games and programs I made almost instantly compared to tape. If I remember rightly, without the Plus 3, you had DFS available to you when booted up but with the Plus 3 attached it showed ADFS when you booted. The thing that really impressed me when comparing to other computer interfaces was just how rock solid they were when you attached both peripherals.... two massive screws bolted each part together (You can see these screw holes in the video, each peripheral had them), they were going NOWHERE....no need for any crappy blue-tak here. I also bought a Brother HR5 ribbon based printer 30 chrs/second (£150)...laughable by todays standards, but I now had hard copy capability, (You only got a few A4 pages off a ribbon cassette insert. With both peripherals attached, it was nearly as big as the BBC.

Have just had a quick glance at your channel and decided to subscribe.Am going to spend many happy hours here methinks.....😁

Thanks for the nostalgia fix, subbed.

My first experience with the Electron, (or any Acorn computers), was 2-3 years ago when I bought one off ebay for £15 with tapes, books and a new PSU. It needed the composite patching up and that was all. I then bought the SD card adapter for it. The only feature I liked was the fact you could use assembly in basic progs. I have'nt touched it for a year or so, though. BTW. Subbed. Great channel.

I'm watching this while playing Cyclone on my ZX Spectrum Next. It is refreshing.

I'm new to your channel. I really like the style. Well done!

BBC was a wonderful machine. Well built, great BASIC brilliant disk drive (which was extra cost and also expensive) great CUB monitors (extra cost again - also expensive) and disk system - the best Elite, plug in ROMs... BUT... Even without the lovely peripherals It was still at least £100 too expensive and needed at least 16k more RAM - preferably 32k At £300 with 64K and 8 months earlier it would have been a winner. I remember being told at the time, when compared to the ZX Spectrum "It's expensive because of the keyboard and case" At the time I thought "I'm not paying a £220 premium - for a keyboard and a better case" Though If I had been loaded in the mid 1980's I definitely would have bought one.

Loved mine. We had BBC Micros at school (As well as Apple II's) and I got an Electron at home. Did SO much of my hom,ework exam project work at home and transfered it across at school.

Lovely video, I do have a big soft spot for the Electron as it was my first ever computer... although the Beeb will always be my first true love!

My first computer in 1991 when I was 5! My brother's mate (David or maybe Darren Allen) came round on my birthday and gave me an Electron and cassette recorder and two shopping bags full of games. I remember one game I played for hours - Daredevil Dennis! 😉

My first usable computer (after the ZX-80) was an Elk. Great machine that meant I could do my Computer Studies homework just fine and run it on the BBC Masters in the computer lab at school. Still got it now, along with a second one (not sure it's working). Plus I now have a couple of BBC B's and Masters. Never had nor wanted a Speccy or C64. I had loads of games for the Electron, never seemed to be a shortage of them in the local computer shops. In fact my school started of with an RML 380Z and some Sinclair ZX-81s and Spectrums for the computer club. Then when they decided to do proper Computer Studies classes they were all replaced with a dozen BBC Master 128s with floppy drives (that lot must have cost the school a fortune, not that I'm complaining).

Ah, might-have-beens are always fun, if a little pointless. If the Electron had released on time things may have been much the same. But it could be the knock-on effects would still be felt to this day. -A much more successful Electron - it didn't do badly in the end, I think it outsold the BBC B. (The speed up hack should have been in the release design along with more RAM, and maybe a joyport in place of one of the three video connectors) -An Acorn that didn't get in to financial trouble and need bailing out by Olivetti. -An Acorn that had the cash to properly support it's RISC architecture. -The RISCOS based series of computers that could have still been around as highly successful mainstream systems today. -Acorn could have been what Apple is today, only more successful as Acorn would own much of the IP on which today's computer industry is based. -But would ARM have become the de-facto mobile architecture and set to take on the desktop if Acorn hadn't needed to spin it off? I would certainly be a much happier computer user if some descendent of RiscOS running on a desktop ARM platform was a popular or even de-facto standard today. The three 'mainstream' OS's of today are all thoroughly nasty to use, each in their own special way. Rambling and dreaming again...

I know I'm late to the party. I used a BBC B at school but couldn't afford one for home, But I had happy times a school playing Elite in computer club on the BBC B. I had a paper round and I saved for almost a year to buy "one of those computer things" .Right after my 14th birthday at the end of october 1983. Of course I ended up with a ZX spectrum 48K rubber key.By this time all my friends had one (and only the rich kids had a C64), it was a no brainer for a teen at that time on a budget to buy the specy. Mine has long scene gone and now I've moved across the pond to canada. But I own a a pre built Harlequin 128k clone running on a sharp aquos 19" TV in PAL with a mini dandanator to quick load my favorite games. My 14 year old son loves to kick my but at Jetpac. No one else here in I know in Canada had a little quirky sinclair (timex) computer or the BBC B. Mention retro computers it's always Commodore here vic 20 or C64 or consoles.

We did not get BBC Micros at my school we got a Research Machines Z80 and all 14 members of The Computer Club including myself had to raise the £800 for an 8 colour board, the school donated £0.00 towards the colour card but when we raised over £1200 0f the £800 the headmaster had the cheek to ask for the £400+ remainder, we more or less told him what to do

I recall telling my parents I NEEDED this for schoolwork that HAD to be done before Christmas, so I had this in my hands before the big day. I read that a paper clip across two of the traces on the expansion port would reset the machine, leaving the loaded game in memory. I bricked it on Boxing Day with this fumbled attempt. I still recall my father red with anger at the shop, not only because “it just broke after a few days”, but it was now half-price!. I did get it replaced, and some blank cassette tapes to try and appease my father, who didn’t get his refund. Subsequent attempts at the reset came later, which allows me to see the full basic program for Sphinx Adventure (though it looked mostly like gobbledygook to me at that time), plus search for the ubiquitous “3” which usually was the ‘bit’ set for number of lives in a game. A similar trick worked on the C64, where peeking a 3 and poking an FF was a regular pastime of mine.

I loved mine, and learned to code on it, even though it arrived 2 months after the Christmas it was due and my mum got sick of me asking “has it arrived yet?”

I have two of the little devils in Manitoba Canada. One power wall wart, a Plus1 interface and an original Acorn tape deck/cables. And the user manuals. I'll be following your resto guide as they are both a little glitchy.

We had one. The edge connector lost its plastic shield, some metallic thing rested up against it and that was the end of the electron.

Had one. Still have one. Hooked me even further in.

In the early 80's I bought an Acorn Atom, the forerunner to the BBC. Still have it.

First computer we had in our household as a kid. Outside the UK, so afterwards it was all MSX.

It's good to have hindsight. I would say that if the Electron was a cut down BBC without the BBC Corp's specification requirements for networking ports etc, but retained everything so that it could play all BBC games without code changes, it would have less likely to have manufacturing delays and likely a success. More people will think - hey I may not have all the hardware stuff, but I don't need it for my kid to code but I can get the machine at close to half the price. Let's face it - how many people with a Beeb used it for networking or printing etc? It's mainly games and learning to code. Without it being totally compatible, it would have no chance. Developers didn't want to code for the BBC because it was a smaller market and then they had to code it twice for both BBC and Electron. They also had to record it twice on tape - each version on one side. It was a lot more work.

I remember owning an Electron. Having had already owned a C64 for a while, I just remember thinking "This is rubbish".

I always loved watching the BBC Computer programs on tv through the 80's (especially the coding episodes) and was a little jealous of BBC Micro owners (having owned a ZX Spectrum at the time). Thanks to Ebay I now own a BBC B at last...And keep up the good work by the way!

The Electron was my first home micro. I still have it along with the plus 1, Watford electronics disk interface and user interface, and a mode 7 display adaptor.

I dreamed of owning a BBC Micro model B but it was expensive for parents, so I managed to save up for a ZX81, but that quickly got exchanged for a Commodore Vic 20.

Recently I sold on eBay my Electron, a Plus One (expansion box), a Plus 3 (3.5in disc drive), manuals, programs: utilities and games, and a stack of Electron User magazines. There was quite a lot of interest in it.

Prolific? You're joking. My highschool (supposedly one of the very best around with over 2.5k pupils) had ONE BBC Micro. The entire time I was at the school, I saw it twice, once at a distance, and my fingers touched the keyboard once, for about two minutes.

That brought back memories! The Electron was my upgrade from a ZX81. I think it's still in the loft at my parent's house. I remember being thrilled when my computer science degree did a whole term on 6502 Assembler as I could work from my digs rather than have to fight for a machine in the computer lab. I also remember spending a lot of hours playing Gauntlet.

I'm going solely on memory with this, but didn't Steve Furber implement a tweak with the ULA that resolved a lot of the issues. It might have been voltage related, I can't be sure. There was disagreement between Furber and Ferranti about this and Furber finally demonstrated Ferranti were wrong.

The ULA seems like an early precursor that the SOCs Arm would design later.

Great stuff. I have an Elk here still

My first computer was an Electron, bought for me when they were at £99.99. It was a good little machine, but I could never find any pocket money games for it. It didn't really help with school either, as we didn't have Beebs. We had Link 380 and 480Zs, built by Research Machines.

The electron was my first computer, I remember it fondly even though I also remember being jealous of my cousins Commodore 64

The electron was my first home computer, and have fond memories of it. The delays killed it, it was £199 and by Xmas '84 the Spectrum+ (better keyboard) was £179, C64 was £199 and 464 (mono monitor) was £239. I don't buy the game/micro crash story, Amstrad released the CPC in 84 and the 464 alone went on to sell 2 million units.

Wikipedia says the special 6502 CPU was from Synertek and not Rockwell, but seeing that it apparently had a halt pin on it for cycling/sharing the bus like Atari's SALLY version of the 6502, which was manufactured for Atari by both Synertek and Rockwell, the same could've happened here too. The ULA makes me think of a what-if had Atari brought to market a merged ANTIC/GTIA/FREDDIE into a single chip, let alone the PIA and the POKEY. That could've been damn near a system-on-a-chip, not counting the 6502. They did get a 6507/TIA/RIOT crammed into a single chip for the 2600jr, but apparently it was more expensive to produce - and/or was more failure prone - than manufacturing the 3 chips separately.

I found a good as new one on the attic. Did the video output solder job that makes it have colour output. Then I soldered a DIY cable for loading software from my telephone audio jack.

In many ways the Electron got screwed over by Ferranti, they just couldn't produced the ULA chips they promised and ended up delivering late with half the chips not actually working because Acorn designed to the limit of the technology. That together with Acorn's lack of experience mass producing down to a price sealed its fate.

I still have an Acorn Electron complete in box. Got it from a charity shop during the mid to late '90s for under £20, complete with some Acornsoft games like 'Snapper' (Pac-Man) & 'Arcadians' (Galaxian). Unfortunately, the keyboard's started acting up, repeating keys at random, so it's pretty much unusable until I can figure out how to fix it.

I remember total biscuit saying he had an acorn archimedes micro computer as a kid, but they were pretty rare from what i remember, as i had a vtech when i was a kid, and I'm around the same age, as what tb would be, as well as being also from the uk.

I've probably owned every micro and 16 bit computer on the market. The acorn electron keyboard was the best of all of them.

I had to rejig a game I'd written for BBC Micro. as it was too slow on the Electron The original push a stack of bricks logic was an elegant recursive procedure ... one reason for it being that I was re-imagining something that I'd seen as a type-in. For the Electron, I had to rip out that procedure and replace it with something that was probably closer to the original... recursion may have been elegant, but it was rather slow. The absolute horror of the Electron's RAM, is that while the BBC used two banks of eight 16k x 1 chips, the Electron used FOUR 64k x 1 chips which needed to access the high and low 4 bits separately! Would 16k x 4 chips have cost much more, and that would have eliminated the performance loss

For some reason I always liked the look of the electron over most of old computers. Wish I had grow up with one but alas american

you won a sub from across the pond simply because of your intro music.

I used to repair Acorn computers down to chip level back in the early to mid 80's and remember the introduction of the Electron. It was damn near unrepairable due to the ULA issue. IE you'd replace the ULA with a new one and it still didn't work because the new one was stuffed too. First thin I did when we got a new batch in after that was test them. We had loads of early life failures too. In general if it ran for 24 hours it was good but you can imagine how much time and therefore cost that added to a repair job.

Might be worth mentioning the Tatung Einstein and possibly the Grundy NewBrain.

Love the nice analog synth tune in your videos. Did you make this yourself?

I enjoyed the drama "Micro Men" with Martin Freeman which was about the Sinclair/Acorn rivalry and a big chunk was about the failure of the Electron. Just out of curiousity I tested that prime number routine on an Amstrad CPC emulator - it takes 10.5 seconds, 10.19 if you default all the variables to integer first, so roughly in between. Hmmm, I'd have thought it'd do a little better but I heard BBC Basic is a VERY fast implementation. That GOTO jumping out of the loop though... 😬😱

Always felt sorry for the two kids at school that got given an Electron.

My dream machine back then was the BBC Model B, but I could never have afforded one so I saved up and bought an Electron instead. I thought it was a brilliant little computer and had great fun playing games and programming on it using it's excellent BBC basic. I got it down from the loft again after many years only to find that it no longer worked. I think the ULA had died. I now have a BBC Model B (and many other 80s home computers) thanks to eBay :-)

Gran Bretaña siempre desarrolló computación de calidad y popular Acorn es el mejor ejemplo de ello; a partiendo del MOS6502, siguió con ARM, hoy podemos disfrutar de eso logros en nuestros celulares; tambien ahora de las grandísimas y populares Raspberry Pi. Lamentablemente cuando de habla de la historia de la informática, solo hablan de Apple, Microsoft e IBM, obviando el gran aporte de Sinclair, Commodore y Acorn, y más atrás, Ferranti. Otra cosa lamentable para mi pais es que Acorn no comercializó sus estupendos productos aquí, supongo que eso se enmarca en el conflicto bélico; sí se fabricaron aquí bajo licencia algunos modelos de Sinclair

In Australia we had BBC Protons but I have never seen an actual Electron.

My first computer was the electron which if I remember rightly needed an extra to connect a joystick so my dad decided to take it back he came home with a cpc 464 for me and kept the electron for himself because the shop gave him the joystick add on as a deal for buying the cpc. He never used so I ended up with the electron too. Win win

Parents bought one for my older brother circa '85/6 (I had C64!). It never worked, they took it back to Dixons twice for replacement. 2nd time they gave up and took a refund and bought him an RC car instead...

What about the 32K RAM placing it at a disadvantage against the Spectrum and the C64? And what were the audio capabilities? Was it closer to the Spectrum or somewhere between a Commodore Plus/4 and an Atari 8-Bit or C64?

Wow, £400 in the 1980s! Although I have to admit I did spend exactly that much on a Sinclair QL in 1984 or 1985.... but that was a REAL computer with disk drives (sort of :) )

This was the machine with 4-bit wide memory (possibly because they had a source of cheap 1*64Kbit(?) chips)? Who in their right mind thought that was a good idea???

Did you ever cover the Enterprise 64/128?

My highschool had Acorn Electrons for computer classes and not even the teacher could figure out what to do with the worthless things. This was when I already had a C64 at home mind you.

Don't think anything would be different because these machines were incredibly expensive and never succeeded outside of the UK.

I was halfway through this video when an eBay announcement popped up, telling me that an Electron I am watching is still available. Coincidence or what?

It was ok but hamstrung by a lack of memory, which resulted in the games not having much depth to them. My dad was offered a cheap second hand one at the tail end of the 8 bit era. It became a bit of a novelty in our household but the Spectrum remained the computer we got out the most.

I had the Vic-20 but the one computer that should have made more impact was the Jupiter Ace.

In the U.S. it was the Apple II that was ubiquitous in schools. It didn't really translate into sales for Apple though. The II did well enough, but in the long term it did them no favors. Did the BBC sell well outside of the school system?

Interesting video! The voice-over sounds muffled though. It's almost like it was recorded at a low sampling rate.

I think the main issue is that it was up against the C64 at the same price. In terms of graphics and sound, I don't think that this computer ever stood a chance of competing without at least beating the C64 in terms of price. It just didn't make sense in terms of value in the market.

The Elk was a sort of clique computer it was the text adventures that got my attention as it had a pretty healthy text adventure selection. I even had Enthar Seven though my Grandmother managed to destroy the floppy drive I had got for some unexplained reason.

Ah,80s 8-bit computing.....truly a golden age.BBC machines, Spectrums, Commodore 64s,etc.....Football Manager,Elite,Jet Set Willy....computing was fun then.It still is,but the sense of wonder is gone.....

My local school as a kid cheaped out and went with the ZX Spectrum 48K not the BBC

I had an Acorn Atom, a simpler version of the BBC. I was great that you could mix basic with assembly code. A friend of mine wrote a telex decoder. Telex was quite common on shortwave. Someone wrote an alternative ROM with more commands. I had it expanded with a floppy drive, where I could save my programs instead of using cassettes. I had a printer attached which costed more than my atom. The memory was expanded by soldering memory chips on top of the existing chips, with one or two pins connected to the PCB using wires (The atom could handle more memory than 12 kB it had room for on main board). When the acorn electron price dropped I bought one. I should have been the successor of the atom, but what a disappointment it was. As far as I can remember, you could no longer program in assembly, and it was not compatible with the acorn atom programs. The telex and morse code applications did not work. I went back to my acorn atom until I bought a 'IBM-compatible' MS-DOS machine.

cool vid :)

Where did you get that price of £175 for a Spectrum? They were £99.95 for a 16k and 129.95 for the 48k.

ADFS ROM was not built in but part of the plus 3.

Looks like a nice box, Why on earth did they not use the micro from the original BBC? It sounds like they waited far too long before starting development work.

As well as being late, IF ONLY they had replaced the 8 flashing colours with actual colours so we could have had a half decent game of snooker on it. A 16 colour mode at the time would have made some awesome games even if the sound was nothing short of bob bar.

If the Electron had Mode 7 it would have made it a far better proposition for anyone needing practicality on a budget.