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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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BBC Micro

The computer which made Acorn famous and Clive Sinclair mad.

Originally called the Proton, this 2MHz 6502, 16 to 32KB BBC Micro computer (pictured) was designed to be sold alongside a BBC TV programme and was thus specified to include lots of interfaces, be very durable and be accessible and powerful to program. Although the higher-specified Model B cost £399, that version outsold the Model A — in total, some 1.5 million were sold.

The system was extremely expandable, with room for extra application or language ROMs, a Tube interface for second processors and general purpose parallel, serial and analogue I/O. It also had Econet networking options and a speech synthesiser that used phonemes recorded by BBC newsreader Kenneth Kendall.

Many BBC Micros are still in use today as process and industrial controllers, thirty years after the design was launched.

Photo credit: Rupert Goodwins

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3 comments

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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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