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Acorns land at Bletchley Park

Summary: Acorn was a star of British tech in the 1980s, but faded as IBM took hold. Take a tour of the computer maker's lineup in this dig through the archives at the National Museum of Computing

By Rupert Goodwins | April 25, 2011 -- 08:53 GMT (01:53 PDT)

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Acorn Atom

Acorn's first home computer, the Atom, came with 2KB of RAM and 8KB of ROM, optional colour graphics, Basic, and a proper keyboard. With a kit price of £120 and a built price of £170, it didn't cost much more than the same keyboard sold as a stand-alone accessory for the earlier rack-based systems. A disk drive, costing twice the price of the computer, was not popular.

Introduced in 1980, the Atom (pictured) lasted until made redundant by the Electron in 1983 — but not before it had been given Acorn's first Econet networking system.

Photo credit: Rupert Goodwins

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As a schoolkid I started saving for an Acorn System One, but I actually ended up getting an Acorn Atom the Christmas after it was released. I taught myself to program in Basic and 6502 Assembler on the Atom (which I still have) using the excellent manual that came with it, "Atomic Theory and Practise". I also learned Forth on it.

As a member of the South Yorkshire Personal Computer Group I was also in the lecture hall when somebody from Acorn came to demonstrate the BBC. I can clearly remember him smoking away whilst showing what it could do in a very casual off-hand fashion. There was a stampede at the end of people wanting to place orders for the machine.

Very fond memories.

I'm surprised you didn't show the Archimedes though.

70421
28 April, 2011 16:17

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Fond memories - so much better than many of the alternatives of the day!

anonymous
13 January, 2012 15:13

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No mention of the Archimedes or the RiscPC, GUI using ARM Chips back then

Considering the interest in the Raspberry Pi and the fact that RiscOS, Acorn's first WYSIWYG drag and drop interface was one of the next big leap.. Why start a story and finish it before the end. Acorn was ARM, and I think we all know where that is today.

I moved from the Electron to the BBC B and then to the Acorn Archimedes and then to a duel CPU (StrongARM 200 Risc) and Intel Pentium 100 two slice RiscPC back in the early 90's and became an Acorn Dealer back then. I have come full circle and now have a Raspberry Pi running RiscOS once more sitting next to my Xeon Intel Powered PC.

Tom (Electro Technical Officer BP Shipping)

Tom Waller
28 December, 2012 19:43

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