Acorn Electron

The Acorn Electron was a budget version of the BBC Micro educational/home computer made by Acorn Computers Ltd. It had 32 kilobytes of RAM, and its ROM memory included BBC BASIC along with its operating system.

The Electron was able to save and load programs onto audio cassette via a supplied converter cable to plug into the microphone socket of any tape recorder. It was capable of basic graphics, and could display onto either a television set or a "green screen" monitor.

The hardware used on the BBC Micro was emulated by a single chip (ULA – uncommitted logic array) designed by Acorn. It had feature limitations such as being unable to output more than one channel of sound instead of being three-way polyphonic, the inability to provide teletext mode and unable to run applications as fast as the 2MHz BBC Micro. The ULA controlled memory access and was able to provide 32K × 8 bits of addressable RAM using 4 × 64K × 1-bit RAM chips (4164).

Technical information

  • CPU: MOS Technology 6502A
  • Clock rate: 1.79 MHz
  • Coprocessor: Custom ULA
  • RAM: 32 KB
  • ROM: 32 KB
  • Text modes: 20×32, 40×25, 40×32, 80×25, 80×32
  • Graphics modes: 160×256 (4 or 16 colours), 320×256 (2 or 4 colours), 640×256 (2 colours)
  • Colours: 8 colours + 8 flashing versions of the same colours
  • Sound: 1 channel of sound + 1 channel of white noise, 7 octaves; built-in speaker
  • Dimensions: 16×34×6.5 cm
  • I/O ports: Expansion port, tape recorder connector (1200 baud), aerial TV connector (RF modulator), RGB video monitor output
  • Power supply: External PSU, 18V


List of Acorn Computers Ltd microcomputers

System 1 | Sys. 2 | Sys. 3 | Sys. 4 | Sys. 5 | Atom | BBC Micro (aka Proton) | BBC Master | Electron | Archimedes range | RISC PC | Phoebe (RISC PC 2)


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