Acorn Electron - Part One: What If This Micro Had Been Released On Time?
Vložit
- čas přidán 28. 01. 2021
- In this slight diversion in our BBC Micro series, we ask 'What if this micro had been released on time?' - Would it have killed the Spectrum Market? Would the face of micro-computing in the UK have been radically different? Why in fact did such a great machine on paper, ultimately (arguably) fail?
Join us as we discover the Acorn Electron. - Věda a technologie
Okay - looking for our most distant Electron - i.e. the one that made it the furthest from the UK :) Any takers?
I live in SE USA. Would love to have one. So feel free to send me one and then it will be really far away. LOL
@@cbmeeks Nice try but my little Elk isn't going anywhere :)
I had one in Poland - got it as a gift from distant UK relatives, back in 1986 or so. I was a clueless kid back then and Electron was a machine virtually unknown in my country. With no access to the software library and the language barrier preventing me from understanding the programming guide it came with, it sat mostly unused, unloved... and was eventually swapped for a C64. Giana Sisters I could understand ;)
I bought another Electron a couple of years ago. Fixed it, gave it a refurb and I can finally appreciate it (although mostly as a display piece). And yes, it is a lovely machine.
@@kacperkucinski7702 You'll have to track down one of the Polish ZX Spectrum clones for me - Been after one for years :) Glad you're enjoying the channel and thanks for watching :)
@@TheRetroShack Hah, easier said than done - there weren't that many "Elwro Junior" computers made. The mid and late 80-ties (when these computers were "designed") were the twilight years of the communist era and a period of constant shortages in Poland. Many of the ICs (including a Z80 clone made in East Germany) were at this point basically unobtanium for the company making these machines. Now they're obviously even harder to get, and when they do appear they're rarely in good shape... and often pricey.
If you'll ever end up in Poland, visit Wroclaw (my home city). We have a museum that displays a range of these machines ( tour.gikme.pl/en/guide/3 )
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.
And THIS is why I love what I do - stories like this! Hats off to your twelve year old self!
I had a hand-me-down Electron around '92, back in the days when a lot of the original micros were just seen as dated junk and I didn't keep it very long. I adored BBC BASIC and the games with it like Arcadian and Snooker. But I also tired of it because it was very fiddly without a joystick port and I couldn't swap listings and software between it and the way more useful school BBC. (Or BBC BASIC enabled PC network there.)
Looking back, I was stupid not to have kept it. I almost always kept old things and still do. When building my BBC collection for my home studio, I only ended up buying most of all my old software favourites again anyway.
Was the shop model discounted?
@@MrDustpile Mrs RetroShack has now banned me from selling any retro computer as she knows I’ll just end up buying another one at some point :)
@@TheRetroShack A handy ban in the long run!
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.
Wow - lucky kid! I have to admit that the ‘Beeb’ is such a ‘grown up’ and well thought out machine - I love it :)
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've lost at least four hours this week playing Elite on this little thing :) Still a great game despite the slowness of the Elk - you get used to it after a few minutes. Thanks for watching!
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.
Exactly! I love the Beeb (Now I finally own one of my own :) :) ) But there's a little space in my heart for the unloved Elk :)
I loved my Electron. It even had a crazy 'Turbo mode' toggle switch on the side.
Yes! I grew up with an Electron, writing code in Basic. Now, 35 years later I am a PHP developer - thank you Acorn.
:) Nice!!
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.
BBC Basic is still one of my favourite implementations of the language. Thanks for watching and hope you enjoy the channel.
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.
Thanks for watching and yes, I’ll be sure to give them a mention in the next video :)
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 was ZX81- Spectrum - CPC 464 - ST - Amiga - PC - IT Career! Missed out on the c64 first time round :( :(
@@TheRetroShack ST and Amiga? Fancy! Just getting into Amiga emulation on the Raspberry Pi actually. Good fun.
I've just watched this video after 2 years it was posted. Thanks for the video.
Glad you enjoyed it!
@@TheRetroShack yeah I did. You guys had a lot of fun back in the day.. wish I had..
Smashing video RetroShack! Love your style and very informative! 😎👍
Thanks very much - Goad you’re enjoying the channel!
You just got yourself another subscriber. Can't wait to dip into this candy store. Great video!
Welcome, and thanks for the sub!
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.
It's an all too familiar story unfortunately, and really shows how Acorn missed the mark, and also really emphasizes just how things *might* have gone if they'd just got the darn thing out on time :(
I was a Specturm owner, but did envy my friend Martin's Acorn Electron, I loved playing Elite on it :-)
Did you ever play Elite on the Spectrum? It's not a bad port at all :)
@@TheRetroShack I have a vague feeling I did play it on the Speccy as I remember seeing it in colour but the Electron version was white IIRC? He alway had the better "educational" computer as he was smarter than the rest of us - imagine Wolfgang Muller from the movie Explorers!
just found your channel (and subscribed) enjoying the content so far......keep up the good work!!
Thanks Chris and glad you’re enjoying the channel - welcome aboard!
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.
Welcome to the channel! I guess your Acorn is our Tandy/Radio Shack :) I’m still after a TRS-80 :) You could get them over here in the UK but they’re hard to find.
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!!
Thanks for the comment and glad you're enjoying the channel! Keep watching as part two of the Elk series will cover modern storage solutions :)
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.
Thanks for sharing Steve - Hope your Beeb lasts another forty years!
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.
Thanks :) If you're an Acorn fan - stay tuned tonight ;)
Have just had a quick glance at your channel and decided to subscribe.Am going to spend many happy hours here methinks.....😁
Glad to have you on board :)
Thanks for the nostalgia fix, subbed.
Welcome!
I'm new to your channel. I really like the style. Well done!
Thanks very much - and welcome!
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.
Can't argue with any of that! :)
"What if" captures a lot of the computing market in the 80'ths.. :P
Keep watching :) The next episode in the series will definitively answer a good few questions :)
Yes the Amiga immediately came to mind.
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.
Thanks for sharing :). Always nice to hear recollections. Make sure you watch the next episode in the Electron series and see just how much some of this stuff has been condensed over the years :)
@@TheRetroShack Will do
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
Well, let me see what I can do about that lack of coverage :) Thanks for watching!
@@TheRetroShack Can't wait. There are a few videos on YT but most don't go into its history, and what has been produced, such as The Micromen documentary gives the impression Chris Curry left Sinclair, formed Acorn and then developed the BBC as their first machine. It would be interesting to see what you come up with... Rgds Malcolm
@@MalcolmCrabbe Well, if Acorn history interests you, you’re going to LOVE what’s coming up soon!! :)
@@TheRetroShack Subscribed ;-)
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.
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!
Think I agree with you there :) Be sure to watch the interview with Paul Fellows if you haven’t already - it’s fascinating :)
I remember owning an Electron. Having had already owned a C64 for a while, I just remember thinking "This is rubbish".
I can imagine - they’re very different machines :)
The C64 was the best 8 bit machine overall, CBM went on to make the Amiga which was the best 16 bit machine, at least until the 386 could be properly utilised under Windows 3.x (which was still a 16 bit OS). I forget what Apple were doing at the time- collapsing, I think. They nearly fell over before CBM did. They only caught up with System 7 and later MacOSs, otherwise it would have been curtains for Apple instead of Commodore.
@@anonUK Yep, in sales the c64 did exceptionally well. I love mine!
The Electron's BBC Basic was a huge improvement over Commodore Basic 2.0.
@@aw34565Indeed it was!
I'm watching this while playing Cyclone on my ZX Spectrum Next. It is refreshing.
Thanks for watching and welcome to the channel :)
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 🥵
My bad - I'll mention in the next episode that DFS was only available with the Plus One. Thanks for watching :)
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 never had a joystick for my speccy and to this day I still prefer the keyboard :)
@@TheRetroShack I never had a joystick at first for my C64 and remember having to return games because they only worked with a joystick! I do remember having to use different Spectrum interfaces depending on joystick support though. That was annoying, particularly when someone broke one of the joysticks (Daly Thompson's joystick breaker :) )
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?”
Great little machine and still great fun to code on :)
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...
It IS fun to speculate :) :) I think Acorn had a real missed opportunity with the Electron but hey, the Wheel Weaves As The Wheel Wills ;)
Had one. Still have one. Hooked me even further in.
Sorry about that :) :)
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.
I think that's the main selling point they banked on, and it wasn't really enough :( Great little machine still.
Interesting. Where did you go to school and in what years did they have both BBC Micros and Apple II's? Do you know if they were II/II+/IIe?
@@RetroDawn They were Apple II's. Starting with those in 1981 (UK), couple of years later, the school brought in BBC Micros (Model B's)
@@EamonBJWyse Interesting. I figured it was UK, ofc. I've only heard of small usage of the Apple II there until the BBC was released and killed it off almost completely. If they said only Apple II on the badge, then, if purchased in 1981, they were old stock Euromod units. The Apple II Plus replaced the II in June 1979 and the Europlus came out after that. The Europlus has "europlus" in green underneath "Apple II" on the badge. There is no FDD autobooting nor Applesoft BASIC (FP-capable) on the II.
@@RetroDawn 1981 was when I got to that school. They’d had them a while before then.
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
Flaming cheek of the man! Our school had an urban legend going around that our Computer Studies teacher (who we lovingly called Concorde because of his nose - 12 year old children are so cruel! ) had used the school RM to hack into the town council offices... Personally, I don't think he had it in him :)
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! 😉
Blimey! There's a blast from the past! Just loaded it up and had a quick five minutes - what a hoot!
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).
BBC Basic was (and still is) a fantastic version of the language - probably still among my favourites to code in :) Welcome to the channel :)
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!
Thanks! I love the Beeb and I’ve grown a bit of a soft spot for the Elk as part of this process :) Thanks for watching!
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.
Hope you get them both working :)
@@TheRetroShack Just got one up and running perfectly. Man its got a lot of stickers inside from inspectors. Issue 4. Clean and reseat the ULA was the fix. Thanks! The second one is still in the UK. I'll get that when the travel ban lifts.
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.
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.
Great stuff. I have an Elk here still
Awesome :) Make sure to watch the next part too :) :)
First computer we had in our household as a kid. Outside the UK, so afterwards it was all MSX.
MSX Is on my hit list :) :) :)
@@TheRetroShack MSX2 was a lovely system. During the MSX1 days, I had a P2000T.. which was just weird.
The electron was my first computer, I remember it fondly even though I also remember being jealous of my cousins Commodore 64
Thanks for watching - I bet you’re not the only one jealous of c64’s :) Me included!
@@TheRetroShack thanks for the video, good nostalgia. Will share to some of my colleagues who don’t believe how primitive computers could be so much fun!
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.
Can't say I'm familiar with that story but it sounds likely :) :)
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.
So in short - your electron got electrocuted... sorry for such Acorny pun. I should be grounded as pun-ishment...
Wow - didn’t even consider that. Presumed it was there for protection from damage, but makes sense as it does protrude unlike other machines such as the Speccy or C64. Interesting!
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.
Vic-20 Series coming up soon :) :)
The ULA seems like an early precursor that the SOCs Arm would design later.
In the early 80's I bought an Acorn Atom, the forerunner to the BBC. Still have it.
That’s very impressive - I always thought it was a lovely looking machine :)
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.
Question is - do you still use it? And oddly, I was looking at the mode 7 adapter only yesterday!
@@TheRetroShack I haven't used it for a number of years but watching your series on the elk has made me want to get it out again and see if it still works. I would need to find a way of driving a VGA display though as I no longer have a display I can use.
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.
Hey, if they are the only signs of a mis-spent youth you have, you’re doing ok :) Thanks for watching!
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.
Wow! I did not know Gauntlet was ever available for the Elk! Guess I'll be hunting that down as it's one of my favourite games! :) Thanks!
@@TheRetroShack I didn't remember this either so I went looking. It's sadly not the gauntlet that I, and probably you, were thinking of. It's just a defender clone. But what looks like a very good one, although I was definitely the odd one out in never actually liking defender.
I used to love Gauntlet. And was pretty damn good at it. Until one fateful day when my finger slipped on the play button of my cassette player and I inadvertently pressed record for a fraction of a second. Never loaded ever again, and the electron seemed to pass away in sympathy soon after 😢
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.
I hope you have hours of fun with it :) :)
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.
Hope this didn’t make you regret selling! :)
Love the nice analog synth tune in your videos. Did you make this yourself?
I wish I could take the credit! It's one of CZcams's copyright free tracks. Still looking for someone to make me some of my own :) Thanks for watching!
@@TheRetroShack I'm sure in time you'll find someone to produce a nice theme song for your channel like Nathan Divino did for Adrian Black 👍
Keep up the good work!
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 :) )
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.
I must have been lucky cos my school had a bank of about ten? At least now you can have one of your very own :) :)
You were just unlucky, then. My school had about 15 Model Bs in a computer room, and the primary school next door had one per classroom. As a general rule, they were very common in schools.
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.
If you've got access to a soldering iron and a bit of time you can re-flow all the solder joints on the keys that aren't working - they tend to develop cold or dry joints over time and that can sort it out - good luck with it, and thanks for watching!
In Australia we had BBC Protons but I have never seen an actual Electron.
Were they actually called BBC Protons in Oz? I never knew that! Thanks for watching all the way from down under :)
No, just BBCs. We had them in school. *PRIV was the best command ;)
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.
Ah! The RM380Z! We had one of those in our school too - giving me feels... Might have to track one down! Thanks for watching :)
@@TheRetroShack I'd love to see a video on those old machines.
The RM 380Z was the first ever machine i did basic programming on. They were huge. Came in a big black rack mount case, which looked a bit silly sat on a school desk.
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
It's a really nice machine and just 'feels' right :) Don't worry - I feel the same way about the TRS-80 :)
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.
Always felt sorry for the two kids at school that got given an Electron.
At the risk of sparking fury in the community - at least it wasn't a Dragon 32... Come at me! :) :)
I appreciate your sympathy :) I enjoyed mine and it helped me start my career in IT. Always wanted a BBC B though but cash was tight ...
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.
Maybe it was his parent's machine? He was only born in 1984 and the Archie was introduced in 1987... If he did have one, he was a lucky kid! :)
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.
That seems to corroborate the story very nicely - thank you!
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.
Fascinating stuff Jeremy! I love to ‘what if’ too :)
I've probably owned every micro and 16 bit computer on the market. The acorn electron keyboard was the best of all of them.
Part 3 of this series coming tomorrow ;). And yes, the keyboard is SUPERB on these machines :)
cool vid :)
Thanks a lot - and thanks for watching :)
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.
Thanks for watching :) It is odd that there’s more cool stuff available for Electrons now than there was forty years ago :) I certainly didn’t appreciate or know much about them back then - definitely on my ignore list at 13! :)
you won a sub from across the pond simply because of your intro music.
Come for the music, stay for the content :) Welcome to the channel :)
Might be worth mentioning the Tatung Einstein and possibly the Grundy NewBrain.
Now there are some machines I’d like to get my hands on!
@@TheRetroShack I had both in the late 80s and early 90s. I did quite a bit of machine code programming on the NewBrain - I wrote my own loader program in BASIC to make it easier. The graphics were quite good - wrote a driver program to screen dump to a dot matrix printer. The Einstein was interesting in that you had to load the DOS (Xstal DOS, DRDos) from the 3 inch floppy drive. Like you, I wish I still had them.
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.
I have very fond memories of my CPC 464 although we weren't rich enough to have the colour screen but I still loved it :) Still trying to get my hands on a nice one :)
@@TheRetroShack Alan Sugar hit the nail on the head with the 464 in '84 with the bundled monitor and built-in tape player. If you needed to get a cassette deck and a portable TV then the 464 was cheaper than the spectrum+ (just), electron and C64 (way cheaper than the BBC).
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
Yes, the little Elk had some strange cost cutting considering the target market for the machine :) Glad you’re enjoying the channel :)
Interesting video! The voice-over sounds muffled though. It's almost like it was recorded at a low sampling rate.
Lol - It's taken me a while to get audio sorted (and still learning) but hopefully more recent videos don't suffer so badly :) Thanks for putting up with it so far :)
Did you ever cover the Enterprise 64/128?
Unfortunately not yet, but it’s on my hit list! :)
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?
Whilst it has less memory, it has a SUPERB basic language. Graphics were were somewhere between the Spectrum and C64. The Elk had more graphics modes, including a true 80 column mode, and no colour clash, but no hardware sprites. Sound was also between the two but more towards the Spectrum, having one sound and one noise channel. As with all these things, it’s often down to popular choice rather than outright capability. There are many superior machines that just died away due to lack of popularity and software support :) Thanks for watching and sharing your thoughts :)
I would never have guessed! Did the Electron even make it to the Antipodes?
I believe it did as there is a New Zealand user group for the BBC and Electron - perhaps someone in the community here is from NZ and had one? Let us know!
I had the Vic-20 but the one computer that should have made more impact was the Jupiter Ace.
Been on the lookout for an Ace for a while now :(
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 :-)
Well, part three of the BBC series is coming at the end of this week - and after that it's going on my desk as a daily driver to write the episodes :) :) :) I love the blooming thing!
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.
ADFS ROM was not built in but part of the plus 3.
Thanks for the info - I’ll make sure to clarify that in the next episode. This is why I love this community - so much knowledge!
Didn’t this use 3.5 floppy disks? I remember one at school with the back ‘brick’ interface and the drive at the side. Im guessing the drive and interface cost more than the machine and were rarer than the BBC Micro.
@@jpalmz1978 The ‘Plus One’ interface added the capacity to use disk drives and by the time you’d added the cost the base Electron you may as well have made the leap to the BBC Model A :)
@@TheRetroShack The Plus 3 was its own interface and didn't need a Plus 1. However, other disk interfaces from the likes of ACP/PRES, Cumana and Slogger plugged into the Plus 1's cartridge slots.
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?
Thanks for watching :) The ‘Beeb’ did sell well, but there were cheaper alternatives and so it didn’t get the pickup it should have done. I had a friend who had one and I remember thinking he must have rich parents :)
The Apple II series was selling well until 1992. They had almost the entire K-12 American public school system tied up and also convinced a lot of upper middle class families that an Apple II was crucial to the success of their children while those with a Commodore 64 or Atari would work for their kids in the future or be on welfare or in jail... The Apple II profits kept Apple in business while the Macintosh line struggled for years before becoming Apple's sole computer line and a success in itself. Hell, the Mac survived - and Apple with it - while in reality, the Atari ST and [Commodore] Amiga perished along with their companies.
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
Winner winner!
Nice production values and commentary. Sounds like you think it the superior machine. What games would you direct me to that compete with or better the Speccy's R-Type, Cobra, Chase HQ, Robocop or Rainbow Islands?
Actually, I think it *could* have been the superior machine IF all but for a couple of hardware decisions and of course the timing of the release. It was ultimately starved of a really good games choice. To see how things could have gone, check out Cyborg Warriors, Exile or Last Ninja 2. Thanks for watching!
@@TheRetroShack many thanks for taking the time to reply. This is another strength of yours. You'll need luck on your side to get a reply from Kim, nostalgia nerd or 8bit guy etc. I have had a quick look at a few videos and whilst I see that it has capabilities, certainly with colour beyond the 48k's dreams, it lacks resolution, detail and sheer character size that the 48k could do. I'll admit it might be more pleasing to the casual observer, but if you can see through the mostly monochrome games the 48k gets the win for me.
@@ru55ells Can’t argue with you - I was a Spectrum owner myself :)
@@TheRetroShack Damn I was hoping you'd put up a fight 😁. Take care mate
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...
I bet you never got him off your c64 though!
To be fair to him, he wasn't massively into games. He's 7 years older than me so wasn't as caught up in the games boom as I was. I remember me being co pilot a few times playing Spy Hunter and operating the 2nd joystick for smoke and oil etc whilst he drove the car and he bought a few games himself to play on the 64 but mostly he was into fishing and RC cars 🚗 thankfully!
@@caeserromero3013 Awesome! Relegated to do-driver cos it wasn’t his machine :) Nice job!
My local school as a kid cheaped out and went with the ZX Spectrum 48K not the BBC
Bet you took every opportunity to play games on them :)
Dahran, Saudi Arabia, it was our main Christmas present, although I suspect my dad bought it more for himself TBH
As a parent, I can state I never do that.... ;)
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... 😬😱
I know, I know... :) :)
@@TheRetroShack I know it's MEANT to take time to demonstrate processing speed, but still... you can speed it up a lot by making d only loop to n/2 because nothing can give a round number divided by more than half itself. And if you don't mind the "dot count" between numbers being off, n can use STEP 2 because even numbers are never going to be prime anyway... For fun, I made a structured (no GOTO) version, incorporated these tweaks, and then used "IF n MOD d=0" for the calculation, and it takes only 2.8 seconds on a CPC, or 3.7 seconds if you want to check ALL the numbers, not just odd ones after 2.
It just goes to show that with these older systems, the way simple things were coded makes a MASSIVE difference to execution speed - a lot of the performance was in the hands of the programmer fine tuning every routine!
@@calebfuller4713 A few years ago, I discovered that there's a BBC BASIC port to the C64, so I tried that .vs. Microsoft's Commodore Basic for a laugh. Even on the same hardware, BBC BASIC was faster (at least twice as fast IIRC), especially if you use integer variables, e.g. A%, I believe these are mapped directly to zero-page locations for speed.
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.
Yep, even if they had upped the memory to 64k and left everything else alone it may have fared better.
Don't think anything would be different because these machines were incredibly expensive and never succeeded outside of the UK.
Keep watching for part 2 - Acorn Research Machines = ARM... :)
I had a electron, snapper was my favourite game.
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.
Thanks for watching :) I still think the atom is one of the most lovely looking machines ever produced - oddly, the other one is the Oric Atmos! :)
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???
Yep, it was the crucial factor that essentially crippled the machine. A ROM version of a program didn’t suffer this bottleneck, yet you needed an add-on to get ROM cartridge functionality :) But then again as I said in the video - built down to a price, not up to a specification. Thanks for watching!
I chose the Beeb back in the day although it cost around £600 here in Norway at the time. Also invested int Technomatic's double floppy station for £400. Still cheaper that the first PCs back then.
Fast RAM was insanely expensive back then. The BBC B used 16x 2Kbyte ICs. It was much cheaper to fit 4x 8Kbyte ICs in the Electron.
The speed penalty was also much worse in high bandwidth modes (0-3) as in addition to the half speed penalty, the CPU was paused throughout the visible portion of the video frame, only running in the blanking intervals. Ouch.
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.....
If you look hard enough, you’ll find it again :)
Would you like to have a Colour Genie? It was my first computer, still have it in my loft with manuals and maybe a couple of games on tape.
Absolutely! Drop me an email to shackofretro@gmail.com and we can discuss further :)
@@TheRetroShack I'll check it's still there first, been years since I've seen it.
I've heard the ULA was at the time the most complex IC in the world? Was that really the case against intel and Motorola cpus?
If the Electron had Mode 7 it would have made it a far better proposition for anyone needing practicality on a budget.