Excellent. The Electron and its ULA had problems, sure, but has always been a bit of a scapegoat for Acorn's mismanagement. Nice to see this part of the story being told.
Queued up for one at a launch locally managed to get one. It played Elite, very happy and it was very capable for its time. No regrets. Sold it later to a friend and he still has it.
I was a Sinclair fan, I owned a ZX81, ZX Spectrum and even a QL... before going all Amiga. I missed the whole BBC thing at schools, literally a year too old. Recently, I bought a BBC Model B and I was so amazingly impressed, the fact that it can do a load of stuff today is incredible and you can most certainly see the Raspberry Pi heritage in there... So I then acquired an Electron and I was equally impressed, for a low cost machine, it was really good. As a teenager when I was in my Sinclair days, I would never admit the Acorn computers were any good (just like all bands other than Duran Duran were terrible), but this machine was better than my Spectrum and really good value, the engineers did an amazing job... add the Acorn Interface Plus 1 and you are getting closer to a BBC with sideways ROM! I always enjoy your videos, keep up the good work and I appreciate your different lens on the Electron story. Top video!
Oh... and I agree on the BBC Basic comment, by teenage self is squirming at me saying so. The ability to embed machine code was amazing and the whole sideways ROM's was so ahead of it's time.
@@RetroBytesUK I think some of the problem was companies insisting on using Microsoft Basic. Computers like the Vic20 had 24K of ROM in which they implemented Microsoft basic. It was really incredible to see sinclair get basic into 4K and 8K ROMS in comparison. Mind blowing. Acorn really tried to make the most of their ROM space to really do things so it had some nice features. The inline assembler is an especially great one.
@@TheDaleyChannel yeah with most micros you could embed the data in your Basic program and Poke the values into memory that way. I think the ability to do conditional compiling (If...then etc) and use the values from variables from your basic code was a real killer feature for a home micro!
I now own a beautifully refurbished BBC Master 128 after recently asking my father to get all my collected computer gear down from the loft where I'd lovingly stored it in boxes from the 80s until the early 00s. After fobbing me off for a while complaining that he was too busy (bear in mind he's long retired sooooo, uh huh 😒) it finally comes to light that he'd thrown it all in the bin. With the excuse of, "it's my house, I'll do whatever I feel like 🤷♂️". So there went my: BBC Model B + ROMs 5¼" drive + media Colour dot matrix Cub monitor 2mb BBC Archimedes A3000 + sampler & midi podule Multi-sync monitor 90s era Cyrix 150 PC with Rage 128 GPU and various other bits Another very high quality monitor (1280x1024 all the way down to MAME's slow-scan arcade modes, that one REALLY stings) So, all in all, what a few grand worth of stuff to replace. _Cheers Dad_ 🤬🖕 Anyway, um, oh yes, _the point_ So now I have a BBC Master and those cartridge slots are _calling_ to me. I'm designing sound and graphics expansion hardware (although a lot of it is learning at the moment, I'm no electronics engineer, yet) In the expansion slot there's audio in and out pins, so you can take the output before it hits the speaker, mix it or process it and then send it on its way. So, how about a Yamaha OPL2 cartridge? Or a digital FX cartridge for adding reverb? It's almost trivial. And then there's graphics, I think I can add a second 6502, a GPU, whose only job is to process graphical commands sent by the main CPU into a local RAM buffer. Tyre GPU will have its own local ROM that implements the GPU assembled commands. The big difference is there's no video I/O pins on the cartridge, it'll require a fly lead from the BBC's RGB out to an RGB in on the cartridge and then mix the two together into a combined output. I haven't looked at the electrons expansion capability but with that expansion box you can get for it this might work on there too, although the pinout is a bit different so maybe it'll need a different PCB board with some pins swapped. Soooo, thanks dad? Actually no, no no, uh uh, no. 😂
As a Spectrum kid back in the day, I never realised how capable the Electron really was - the BBC was for kids whose parents worked in tech or had better cars than we did, and I suspect the BBC was always "Dad's computer" really. But the Speccy was *ours* and it was a lot of fun. The Electron didn't get much coverage from what I remember, and I think it was often associated with the BBC and therefore had the taint of being 'something to do with school', so I only had one friend with one. And that was lumped with a greenscreen monitor, so I always thought it was monochrome like the ZX81. Ha! Have to say, the ability to use assembly inline in BASIC would have been a gamechanger on any machine. Brilliant idea. Much easier to debug than pages of hexadecimal. I'm still scarred by erntering long listings from magazines in that format...
Outside of the likes of Acorn user, the electron really did struggle to get coverage in magazines, and you're right the association with school probably did not help.
It's great to see a video that doesn't just simplistically blame the Electron for Acorn's financial problems; it didn't help, but it wasn't the sole issue. And thanks for showing the ElkSD, it's always pleasing to see my designs in videos!
Great video on my much loved Acorn Electron. When I wanted to upgrade from a ZX81 I had looked at my friends computers (Spectrum and BBC B), and thought how much better the BBC B was, but the price was an issue. The Electron coming out clinched it for me. I used it for around 9 years before buying a PC. Bought the Plus 1 immediately when it was released. I wanted a disk drive, but the cost was too high back then.
As a young kid I accompanied my Dad to Acorn HQ to pick up some pre-print galleys from John Coll for one of the Beeb manuals (the non-provisional User Guide maybe?) and they let me have a go on a prototype Electron. It probably didn’t go down too well when I had a bit of a hissy fit over its lack of MODE 7. All user feedback is good, I guess! Might be why I ended up with a Beeb for my birthday rather than an Electron as planned.
Great video! I agree with you on BASIC, came across it after I upgraded from a C64 to the Archimedes 3000 and was blown away by it's features. Then I was born a second time when I realized that it had been used on all the Acorn 8 But models as well. So I was really happy when I found an Electron among the computers O rescued from being scrapped. Only thing I need is a Plus One. And a LISP cartridge, because I love this language. IMO it's the most underrated programming languages of all time. Granted, most people are taken aback by all the parenthesis, and it really needs some getting used to them. But they are an essential component of structuring code and data. LISP (and Common Lisp nowadays) still had features that sets it apart from most other programming languages.
Friend of mine had an Electron, it certainly gave the BBC experience in a more humble package. In this day and age, I much prefer the small form factors of such kit… but then again, I had (and loved) a CBM Plus/4 back in the day. As a (nearly retired) software engineer, I’d say there are some really amazing things about the BBC and Electron hardware & software architecture - to my mind, the sideways ROM system and 2nd processor concept are probably my top features. BBC BASIC is a wonder, although I always question the 'BBC BASIC is twice as fast' when it ran on hardware twice as fast as other 6502 systems of the time 😉 … it’s other features like structured programming and the assembler deserve the hype. Sadly when it came to user interface, Acorn were still stuck with a paper terminal mentality and its 'copy key' editing reflects that. The BBC and Electron modern online community seems filled with friendly enthusiasts helping people keep this venerable old kit alive, supplemented with modern additions to help in a world where the supporting kit is ever harder to come by.
"A keyboard that didn't suck" Absolutely right on that count, sir. I never owned an Acorn (BBC or otherwise), but I did a ZX-Spectrum. I have not-so-fond memories of separating the layers of the keyboard and fixing the conductors with aluminum foil, and when that stopped working, silver paste.
Any time, I was hoping it might push some traffic your way. Unfortunately this video is not doing overly well so it might not push the needle on your elementum video.
I remember when was in Year 9 and we did an Insight Into Industry project while Year 10 were on work experience and Year 11 were doing exams. Our Insight Into Industry thing involved brewing beer (which we sadly never got to try) marketing it and this also involved visitng an independent brewery called the Big Lamp Brewery in Newcastle's West End that one of our teachers (Mr Hanson, a physics teacher from Yorkshire) was friends with the management. The entire brewing process was being ran by an Acorn Electron and this would have been the early 1990s! I suppose it's what you would have expected from a brewery ran by British schoolteachers! They knew the BBC Micro and the Elk was a cheaper version of that!
Snapper (Pac-man) was so good in the first release that Acornsoft were required to re-release it with updated graphics. In the first release (only available for the BBC) the graphics for Pac-man and the ghosts were near 100% identical to the arcade.
My Electron's ULA was either crashing or corrupting the MODE 0-2 displays until it died after a couple of years out of warranty, but my dad somehow found another system board which thankfully had a better Ferranti ULA that stayed working.
Excellent video as always. The Electron was my very first computer so it has a special place in my heart! I wouldn't be where I am today without this humble machine 😁
Its the same for me, without the humble little Elk I don't think I would have the interest in computers I now do. It was just a great little machine that I feel has been misrepresented at lot on YT.
I got an Issue 6 dirt cheap as a repair in 1986, which allowed me to do BBC BASIC programming for Computer Graphics 1 & 2 in my digs at Uni. Since it was mostly heavy lifting on matrix maths, the elk was fine - I then just had to programme the output on the Micro Lab's BBC Master at the end (although the prototyping of what I wanted was simplified on the Elk, due to the heavily structured BASIC. It's still going strong now, and i've added a few toys that weren't available in the 80s. As to games - Elite and Robotron were the most played. I had the Bud joystick cart that worked pretty well with Robotron.
Well thanks for the games, my eldest is now obessed with playing elecrobots. I need to get an emulator running on his vita so I can have my laptop back. Hope you enjoyed your holiday over here.
@@RetroBytesUK Or let him play on the Electron itself 😄 We very much enjoyed our summer holiday in the UK and I especially liked finally visiting the computer museum in Cambridge!
I can remember developing a floppy disk drive interface for an Electron way back at university. Bought a BBC Model B with first pay packet as a result, went on to ARM machines and ended up helping introduce ARM processors into Philips Semiconductors while working at Philips.
A brilliant video on one of my favourite 8-bit machines of all time (well equal favourite with the BBC Micro and BBC Master if I'm completely honest!). Fun fact: The Barson Econet interface... that was aimed mainly at the Australian market. The BBC Micro was extremely popular with the education sector down here, and that Econet adapter was designed to help bring the cost down of setting up Econet networks in schools. I'm not sure how many were sold and I've never seen one in the wild, but IIRC the schematics for this adapter were published on Stardot a couple of years back.
The cartridge based econet interface some one on slashdot put together works rather well, assuming the Barson interface worked as well it makes for a good econet station.
I always did enjoy the early Acorn naming scheme. Atom, Proton, Electron. Of course it's less obvious where to go after that... the neutrino? The quark? I can understand why they branched-out into other product lines with different naming schemes.
It's true regarding the excellent Electron and BBC Micro keyboards- the Spectrum was created to be cheaper, and with that you'd get a dead-flesh keyboard. At least Acorn still provided a cheaper Electron computer with a great keyboard.
Love it! I started with ZX81 and then later Speccy back in early 1980 in Poland and due to embargo it’s was very hard to get any computers and they came kind of delayed by 2-3 years to Poland mostly brought in by folks travelling from outside the communist block so I never heard about Acorn computers until the retro scene picked up but I love this machine and it’s system flexibility. Lots of memory, superb Basic and good keyboard would make me a very happy kid as I didn’t have many games for ZX81 and had to program them myself:) but these were the times we used to live in and even ZX81 with 1kb made me happy back then so just imagine if I had this machine ;) and I think I’m going to get one to play with! Great video, Thank you!
i'm a United States guy… So my experience was mainly with the Commodore 64 and it's ilk... This was both a great introduction and a great overview of the acorn systems… I am really impressed both with your presentation and with this computer… Continued success! Oh, and I'm subscribed!
Top video, took me back to my teenage years getting an Acorn Electron to replace my ZX81, great little machine. Playing around with the in built BASIC started me on the career that I am still doing to this day.
I find it really interesting that as an Austrian getting a C64 in 1988 I had never heard of the BBC and Electron before rather recent UA-cam videos. The Archimedes showed up in some magazines, as well as some Sinclair Spectrums, but Acorn's 8-bit aera went by completely unnoticed here. Many thanks for your excellent videos!
Anybody remember the song "Hey hey 16K"? It had the lyric "Acorn Electron - cheaper BBC micro". I think that was the problem around perception, ultimately. Cheaper versions of an existing home micro sounded commercially sensible, but never sold well. The 16K version of the Spectrum never sold in the same volumes as the 48K version, for example. In fact, it might've been the 16K version that spurred on the sales of the 48K version, because people realised spending a little more got them a lot more in terms of computing power. Ditto with Commodore's attempts after the C64 to produce cutdown versions like the Plus 4 and Commodore 16. Atari 800 and 400? Same story.
If Acorn had dropped the sound functionality from the ULA and just use the normal TI sound chip, it would have helped eliminate the ULA constraints and allowed the Electron to have its full BBC sound system. Yes it would have added a little to production cost, but it would have also helped it sell more machines and at the same time lower development cost.
There's an anniversary panel with Sophie Wilson, Chris Curry and some other Acorn luminaries, and that's one of the ideas Chris Curry mentions they could have done had they not been so slavish about sticking to the price point they'd envisioned.
You’re incorrect about the screen modes in Elite using less memory for the colour section. The colour section is half the resolution of the B&W section, but has TWICE the number of colours. Therefore it requires the exact same amount of RAM. Where the BBC wins here is that it can change the width of the screen to use less memory overall due to having a 6845 video controller. On the BBC the mode 4 screen is reprogrammed to be only 256 pixels across with wider hardware borders, but on the Electron the ULA only permits full width screen mode 4 with a full 320 pixels. The wider border has to be implemented by “wasting” screen memory, instead of being provided at no cost by the hardware.
You can also switch modes mid-screen with the Electron, but the hardware gives you limited support with the timing. Generally, games relied on various fixed interrupts to do mid-screen tasks, often enabling or disabling the palette in order to hide data stored in the screen memory. Some authors went quite a bit further with a strict timing regime to perform tasks at scanline-level resolution. Indeed, the video shows Firetrack which switched between two modes with different memory requirements and characteristics in order to perform the vertical scrolling, and this was probably one of the most accomplished ULA hacks that we know of. Unfortunately, the Firetrack footage seems to have been recorded without "locking" the sync, which was something that occasionally needed to be done manually by pressing a key after starting the game, so there is a certain amount of glitching being shown.
Actually you are incorrect in your B&W vs colour calculation. Halving the resolution doesn't just halve the horizontal pixel count it also halves the vertical count resulting a quarter of the total pixel count. So after doubling the bits per pixel you still end up halving the memory needed. Similarly going from mode 0 to mode 2 would result in a 1:16 pixel ratio with 1:4 bpp for 75% a saving of memory.
@@MikePerigo Nope. All standard BBC and Electron graphics modes had 256 pixels of the exact same height (2 interlaced scan lines) in the vertical direction (32 6845 character rows of 8 pixels each, at least in non-US models). I should clarify that when I said “half the resolution” I meant half in the x-axis *only.* TBH I took it as generally understood that the Beeb platform as a whole doesn’t permit vertical resolution changes in *any* graphics mode. You can have roughly square 1:1 pixels (modes 1 and 4), 2:1 pixels (modes 2 and 5), and 0.5:1 pixels (mode 0). Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
@@stuartmcconnachie Apologies. I had forgotten that the Beeb never changes the vertical resolution. I also forget which modes are being selected in this case. Modes 0 and 1 trade horizontal resolution for colour and use the same amount of memory (20k/screen) but mode 5 doubles the colours for a quarter of the horizontal pixels and only uses half the amount of memory. If Electron Elite isn't doing a mode 0/5 switch then I wonder what else could be using more of the available memory that necessitated the excision of game features.
@ The Beeb has the 6845 CRTC (Cathode Ray Tube Controller) which allows the user to change multiple aspects of how the video signal is constructed. One thing you can change is the number of “characters” per row of the screen. In this context a “character” is a single byte, however many pixels a byte may generate in the given mode. In “regular” modes this is set to 80 (modes 0, 1 and 2 and 3) or 40 (modes 4, 5 and 6). In Elite (mode 4/5) this 6845 register is reprogrammed to 32 which gives 32x8=256 pixels instead of the normal 40x8=320 pixels of the regular mode. Effectively this means on the Beeb the screen is 32 bytes wide by 256 rows = 8K, instead of 40 bytes by 256 rows = 10K. The electron in contrast lacks that bit of specialised hardware and instead the role of the CRTC is performed by circuitry in the Electron ULA. It’s a much more basic affair, and the screen width is fixed at either 40 or 80 characters. It can NOT be programmed to any other arbitrary values. This means the mode 4 screen still takes up the whole 10K of RAM. The unused 40-32=8 characters (64 pixels) are still present on each row, and have to be filled with zeros. Wasted space that can be reclaimed on the Beeb where the zeros are generated by the 6845 hardware as an extension of the left and right border areas.
Currently have 2 x Electrons + 1 x plus 1. I recently bought an Elksd128 and a Slogger Pegasus. It was the first computer we had in our household, But we didn't have the plus one. We bought our Electron before the plus 1 had been released(unfortunately). I'm glad to see and here that people are still making games and hardware for retro 8 bit machines. Excellent video, loved it.
When I was at uni in 1987 studying comp sci, I got into an argument with the principle lecturer about the nature of structured programming. A big fan of Pascal, he insisted that it wasn't possible to create bug-free progams in languages such as C or BASIC. I disagreed, claiming that I could write a version of one of the main 1st year projects in BASIC (for my Electron) which, using the design methods he was teaching, would run first time with no errors (barring any initial data entry typos). In other words, the entire program would be written without ever touching a computer, not tested until it was completely finished, because his conceptual idea was that the solution to a problem should be viable on any funcionally capable system, ie. a way of encouraging students to approach problem solving without becoming restricted in their thinking by the limitations and nuance of the target hardware. The idea has merit, but I was certain one didn't have to be using a language which by its nature kinda imposed a structured approach. And so I did write the program, it did run first time on my Electron without error, likewise on a Beeb at the uni, the code was clear, structured, everything the lecturer wanted, and he did concede the point. However, I suppose I had the advantage of using a BASIC which came with a number of facilities that encouraged structured programming, such as procedures. I wrote various things for the C64 and I suspect that version of BASIC may have been a bit more challenging, typical code awash with GOTO and GOSUB. I also had the advantage of having earlier supplied my school with numerous programs for teaching, including a chemistry database and a math fractions program for the remedial class, so I already had some experience writing code which had to be reliable but also portable (I used an Electron, but all the systems at school were Beebs). I wrote lots of games, started working with machine code, was just getting properly into 3D (focusing on CAD & design programs) before going to uni, where it all kinda fell by the wayside after 2nd year due to lack of time (I stupidly never sent any program examples to a magazine or publisher; the untrodden path in life). Writing for the Electron was very rewarding, especially that leap in what was possible when first trying machine code, in my case used to accelerate screen fill routines for onscreen menu selection. A perpetual problem though was data storage, ie. saving stuff on tapes, years of battling with mono tape decks (who remembers "Data Recorders", the b.s. label slapped onto cheap mono decks and sold to home micro users as if they were designed specifically for computers? What a ripoff!); it wasn't until much later that I discovered recordings worked way better with a reasonable hifi deck. Before then, well, my brother recall's my once threatening my Electron with a screwdriver if it didn't damn well load a very large program after the ninety bajillionth attempt (a version of Monopoly typed in from a magazine), which as it happens it finally did. Dare I say the dreaded words, "Data: rewind tape!". To this day I don't know why it never occured to me to try using a lower baud rate. Thankfully, much later I obtained a Beeb and was able to rescue almost all the programs by moving them over to floppies. Now I have a large collection of both systems, including Plus1s, a Plus3, Plus5, also Masters, Arcs and so on. Still no Atom though, hard to find for a price that doesn't sting the eyes. My original Electron doesn't work anymore (I simply wore it out), but I am determined to repair it. I have many other units to act as parts donors if need be. I've talked about this many times with people of similar age (I'm 53), there was something quite unique about that time period in the 1980s, the ability to get close to the hardware when writing programs, to take a device which on its own wasn't doing anything and then bring it to life via one's own imagination and effort through coding. I think I enjoyed the process of writing programs more than using the end results though, eg. my friends liked playing the games I wrote more than I did, perhaps because I knew too much about how they worked, often the extremely simple rules that made possible seemingly complex but effective behaviour, though even I found it hard to beat my implementation of Battleships. :D Of my friends circle at school, I was the only one who had an Electron; everyone else, if they had something at all, owned a Beeb, C64, Spectrum, Oric or Dragon32. Not much variation beyond that though, I lived on an island so there was little choice beyond rare travel to a mainland store. I remember initially really wanting an Enterprise 128, but that came out way too late, and with hindsight I was better off with the Electron, though I did obtain a complete Enterprise eventually for my collection. You mentioned the compact form factor of the Electron, something which for me perhaps led to a particular bias that I don't really understand, namely, I have no interest in any home micro where the keyboard is separate from the system. I have no idea why, somehow it just doesn't seem the same. So the Beeb, Master, Arc and likewise C64/128, Amiga 1200, 1040ST, C64, CPC464, Spectrum +3 and dozens of others, I love them all, especially the ST which I used extensively at uni, writing the largest 3rd year project ever submitted (68K assembly). But the models with a separate keyboard, like the later Amigas, or the RISC PC (I have one, will probably sell it), meh, somehow they just don't grab me. Can't explain why, there's just something about the single unit nature of most home micros that I find particularly appealing. Am I alone in this perception? So here's to the Electron, because without it I would never have gone to uni, never gotten so involved with Doom and the N64, and never discovered SGIs which has been my main thing ever since. Being able to use tech back then in such a manner was inspiration for so many in later life. I can't imagine how that can be possible now in any equivalent form, with everything being so black box and more complicated. It's perfectly possible to learn and understand how an 80s micro works; can't do that with a modern smartphone, nor with any kind of PC beyond just a bare bones functional block diagram. There is of course the Pi scene, and PC benchmarking/overclocking (which I do now aswell sometimes), but it's not the same thing. The 80s was unique, for both home micro coding, typing listings in from magazines or even the TV, cheap games, and messing about with electronics, the latter not yet at a stage of complexity that meant opening up devices was pointless; who else used to roam landfill sites looking for tape decks, VCRs, hifi units, laserdisc players, radios, etc., to take them home, take them apart, desolder stuff, create new things, drive one's parents crazy with the smell of solder, bits everywhere, whacko inventions and the occasional minor explosion? :D Can't do that anymore, modern consumer devices are just a couple of blank ICs, SMCs and some glue logic, very little in the way of anything one can meddle with to create new things, or even just repair what one finds. Even my gf commented with much surprise at just how little was inside her mother's DVD player when I opened it up to try and fix a signal fault, the machine could easily have been half the size it was. Long live the Electron, and, frankly, all home micros from that time, because it was an awesome era to be alive and able to use them in the ways so many of us did. It's funny that at the time there was always so much playground argument about which system was better, but looking back I think it's great they all existed. I've enjoyed reading the memories of others here; next year, or perhaps 2025, I intend collating such memories for a vintage museum site. Anyone else here remember looking forward to the next issue of Input magazine? Lastly, my own controversial opinion: I played Elite do death on my Electron, likewise on a Beeb later, and I have half a dozen versions for other 80s micros aswell, but my favourite version is for the C64. It just has a certain something I can't describe, perhaps in part the music (Commodore sure nailed it with the SID).
The '80s were exciting times for home computing enthusiasts, new machines coming out with great new features, and Acorn were right up there and the BBC model B was superb. I never owned one, I'd already spent all my cash on an Apple ][, but the company I worked for in the '80s and '90s used a lot of them in all manner of applications and I had a lot of fun writing that stuff, very powerful machines for their time. I'm pleased that there's still a lot of interest in these old machines, each of them tells a story and will have a special place in their owners hearts.
Actually... yes, BBC BASIC was the best, as was the keyboard. For a while I think I ran mine with a BBC Forth ROM as the start language (I could be wrong, but I know I used Forth for a while). Wouldn't have had my career if it wasn't for my school's adoption of Acorn machines, a teacher whose name has temporarily gone missing but who was super enthusiastic and encouraging and my parents who "happily" bought me a BBC B. Played with Electrons in the school lab but always went back to the warm embrace of the Beeb.
Great perspective. The BBC Micro appeared in my school as I was starting my ‘A’ levels, we were already programming on the Research Machines 380-Z and yes the version of Basic was the best I encountered. Including assembler support was a genius move so when I went on to Uni I already knew 6502 and Z80 learnt Z80 on the 380-Z (although not nearly as seamless and simple experience…). That may also explain why my results… weren’t the best!
"the BASIC you kids were learning at school"... except we weren't.... most (all?) Scottish secondary schools were teaching COMAL and not BASIC.... however I have no idea what they were doing south of the border. What I do know is due to this not only did the school machines all have the COMAL rom, other machines that we could access like those in libraries had COMAL roms. I have no idea if there was COMAL for the Electron, or even if the BBC one would work but none of the Electrons I came into contact with had it.
Neat, I'd never heard of COMAL. It looks like a big step up. According to wikipedia, there was some form of COMAL for Electrons, as evidence by the existince of the book COMAL on the BBC Microcomputer and Acorn Electron SBD 19. Acornsoft. ISBN 978-0907876908. But who knows what sort of production it got into.
The Acornsoft COMAL did run on electron, however it was not cheap, so if you where in the market for a budget sysyem you may not have been COMAL user. It shipped as both disk and a language ROM.
I should mention COMAL was not available until 84, so schools would have needed to teach another language for the first few years of the BBC computer literacy project. All the school materials they made available where for Basic.
My high school in Scotland in around 1985 had a 'lab' fitted out with BBCs with Econet and a shared double hard disc drive as a network drive. We had one teacher who knew and understood them, so he knew the value of BBC basic - before him the school had an Apple ][ and a Commodore PET and no-one was allowed to touch them in case they got damaged (I remember some of the teachers played a keyboard-mashing 'Olympics' thing on one of them a fair bit though...
BBC BASIC was itself influenced by COMAL and had about 2/3 of the features so some schools (including mine) decided it was not worth the extra cost. On the Commodore PET (with its very limited BASIC) it was a more attractive option.
Great video. Got the Electron for Christmas when I was 8. Basic on that machine is what lead we to work in the software industry 40 years later. (I sold it for a Spectrum +2 a few years later as it just didn't have enough games....or at least ones I could "swap" with my friends at school)
I had never heard much of the Electron until Adrian got one to repair. Your story was quite comprehensive thanks and I think I would have been happy with it, probably happier than with my Nascom 2 (so much to say about that) or my C64 and it's horrible keyboard.
Thanks for the interesting and informative video. My first computer was an electron but found it lacked the power of the Beeb at school and the games of my mates' Speccies. A jack of no trades. As soon as I could, I binned it for a CPC6128, which was the antithesis of the chopped down electron and had Locomotive Basic - arguably the next evolution of BBC basic. I had to laugh at the irony of finding out that the all-white display for Elite took up more memory than the colour HUD of the Beeb version and that this was responsible for some of the omissions from the electron version. Talk about shooting yourself in both feet.
You missed the Oric-1… truly an AWFUL keyboard. Not a flat membrane, but the keys were extremely small, hard and painful to press. For me, it was the worst keyboard on the market. (The worst membrane keyboard was the Atari 400.)
Of all the computer kit I've owned over the years, the Electron is the one I've held on to, along with the Plus1 and Plus3, still bolted securely on the back. Got it down from the loft a few months ago and fired it up for the first time in about 30 years. Amazingly, it still worked fine and read the disks perfectly! Great piece of kit. Would have loved to have owned a BBC back in the day, but it was well beyond my price range, so the Electron it was.
As an old programmer of the Elk, indeed having had an Electron way before I could afford a BBC, three cheers for saying what you said. It was a good bit of hardware - compromised, yes, but not in as many ways as people thought. My games used an interrupt to change colours and you could change modes too (I think, boy is my memory as failure-prone as a wibbly RAMpack on a ZX81 hoho) which could've given Elite the same colorful appearance as the Beeb version. Most of my games stuck to Mode 5, with a colour change, and a screen at 20 character lines deep, as the same interrupt could turn all the colours to black, meaning you could store data on screen without it being visible - if only on the bottom, not covering sides or allowing narrower screensizes. Still it meant Barbarian and Last Ninja et al could run on either Beeb or Lekko with a few minor changes. Delete a tune here or there, enhance this or that if any memory left (usually no byte left unused though) Anyhoo, many cheers, much more than three - say fifty-six? - for Mr Retrobytes.
I loved my Electron ! I also spent hours on Elite, Jeff Minters Gridrunner and the best port of Defender I have seen. The inline assembler was so cool too. Great bit of history...cheers!
Here in New Zealand, we mostly had ZX81, Spectrum and C64. I had heard of Acorn, but I never saw one until my friend arrived from the UK with an Electron. We played on it sometimes, but I had so much more software for my Spectrum, and finding Acorn software was difficult here. I heard that a few of our schools had BBC micros, but still, I never saw one. Then one day, I was at a computer show and saw an Archimedes running Zarch. When I saw the price tag, I nearly died. Then Acorn were gone. That's basically how little headway they made into the NZ general market in my experience.
Acorn was a big supplier to the education market in New Zealand. We had a lab full of BBC Micros, and that eventually got replaced by an even larger lab of Archimedes A3000s and eventually an A5000 or something too I think. One of the teachers had a Master at home (compact I think), and a friend of mine had at least a RISC PC and an A4 I think (laptop Archimedes). But yeah I didn't know any families with Electrons nor A3010s (home version of A3000). Families went for Commodore.
@@MrKurtHaeusler Interesting. Of the other schools I visited, I never saw any. I certainly never saw one Acorn product at any friend's house. It was typically Apple, IBM, Sinclair, or Commodore. Schools were usually Apple or IBM/ clones. I would have loved to use BBCs at school. I guess they were too expensive for most schools.
Since you mentioned Elite, Alexander the OK did an excellent video on it, and it's a fascinating deep dive into the challenges facing a programmer in the age of the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. The game with the border (name escapes me at time of writing) reminded me of the game Revs, which got around memory limitations by using video memory to store data in the sky and then tricking the display into showing that area in blue. If the game crashed, the sky would be replaced with garbage.
The electron might have been a hobbled beeb, but it was still better than anything else for actually doing stuff on. It was only when I started messing with other 8-bit systems that I realised just how good us beeb users had it. Porting from bbc basic to any other flavour was awful, and usually just meant re-writing the whole damn thing!
Porting *any* BASIC to any *other* BASIC often meant rewriting the whole program - it was just how things were back then. If you were lucky, magazine listings would explain what the machine-specific PEEKs and POKEs did to try and aid translation to other machines, but it wasn't all that common.
I can't thumbs up this video a second time, but I can comment again after watching the video to the very end. I'll do a search to see if you've done a video on the Oric-1, the keyboard was somewhere between dead-flesh and Electron, I learned 6502 machine code on it. Thank you so much for making these videos, I recently had a little rant about how some UA-camrs with a zero budget are making better content than the BBC...makers of Strictly, Mrs Brown's boys etc... I watch WAY more content on here than I do BBC content thanks to channels like yours. ❤&✌ Edit: Found the Chuck Peddle video...
Ma and Pa bought mine from Co-Op as Acorn were trying to sell them off cheap! Got me into programming, basic, and computers... Thanks to the little Acorn Electron! The ULA was the part which ultimately died in the end, absolute shame as I used the Elk all the way throughout the 80s into the early 90s. Machine code was always a bit of a faff and in most cases, you would spend hours typing in listings and hours debugging the code, then save to cassette, then the code wouldn't load in from cassette... Fun? Hmmmm.. Kept me quiet for a few hours. The rear expansion port was also used with a "Commander" interface for joysticks! You had to load a piece of code in first, then it would be 2 chances if worked.
Fascinating stuff! With Elite, losing the Thargons is OK.. but the local star though? Does that mean you can't use fuel scoops to refuel near the sun? That in-line assembler is just lovely.... I typed in an assembler on the ZX Spectrum. It's pretty good! Or you hand assemble on graph paper, Sandy White style...
You still have the scoops for cargo, I never tried scouping fuel on the ecloectron version so you might not have been able to what with the local star not being present.
This is the best in depth look at a 80's computer I've seen, excellent work. It is a pity they didn't make the electron as a cost reduced BBC but 100% software compatible, while it did sell well, I would have thought many would have then bought it instead of saving up for a BBC.
I had an Acorn Electron and it was a fantastic wee machine. Personally, I would rate the Electron’s keyboard as the best I have ever used and preferred it over the BBC Micro. As for BASIC, the BBC version was/is excellent although I would give the edge to Z80 BASIC on the Amstrad CPC6128 (which I also had). Having said that, there is little between the versions and both are fine examples of 8 bit BASIC.
I can't pick the difference between the Elk keyboard and the Model B, though the former appears more impressive than the latter because nobody expects a computer that's as small as the Elk a keyboard of that calibre.
This was a really cool video. In the 80s here in Ireland my Mom was a teacher so she had heard the BBC computers were the one to buy. My first computer was a BBC Master 128k with floppy drive and RGB monitor (Phillips CM8833 I think was the model). From about the age of 10 I learned to program with BBC Basic and used to love making my own games. Friends had Spectrums and Amstrad systems but I found the BBC easier to program. You pointed out things like DEFPROC in BBC Basic and so on here and that brought back so many memories. The only thing I used to find back then was the lack of games in the game stores here in the 80s for my BBC. I found when I bought a tape deck and hooked that up I had access to way more games. I had often heard about the Electron but never knew a whole lot about it before this video. I hope someday to buy another BBC Master again as sadly I don't have the one from my childhood. Because of Acorn though I can say I'm 25 years now working in IT and as a System Admin and wouldn't have gotten there without the BBC ))
I find that most my IT colleagues had a BBC or Electron when they where kids, well at least ones over a certain age. I hope you manage to find a Master again, as that was a great machine to have for your first computer.
My very first home computer! An Electron, then an Archimedes, and then PCs. Also I completely agree about how excellent the BBC Basic with an underlying OS was.
I had one of these back in 1984 for a week. It was so slow for the software I needed to use that I returned it and replaced with a CPC464, which cost more and I had to rewrite my programs, but was faster with better graphics and more memory. A missed opportunity for Acorn is so many ways. BBC Micro compatibility was the Electron's best selling point and the technical compromises destroyed that.
As a filthy American, I sort of love all these weird computers, but the best I had in equivalent was an original Gameboy with no color (I was born in 97) but I loved that sort of feeling of quirky cheap tech, and chicken run was pretty fun as I remember. I wish I was able to get some of these micros, but I have elevendy computers, and cars, and guns, so until I move, I guess that's gonna have to wait until they become priceless, and I proceed to kick myself.
You might reconsider calling the Electron "weird". Whilst there were undoubtedly some weird computers back in the 80s, the Electron wasn't one of them. It may have had shortcomings, but it still had a notably highly intelligent design (being so close to the BBC Micro, which was pretty much the best quality computer design in the 1980s). Anyway, if you use a smartphone today, or a modern Apple Mac, or ANY device with an ARM-based processor in it, remember that it was the same people behind the Electron, the BBC Micro, BBC BASIC and so on who made all that possible by designing the ARM chip in the first place.
My first computer, well back then was my families first computer and introduced me to my love of computers. I did later replace it with a Commodore 64 due to the range of games, however the Electron was definitely an underrated computer.
I had an electron and then later I had a BBC B, the electron was nice little machine which always thought of as a progression of the Acorn Atom rather than a scaled down BeeB. It did feel like a huge upgrade to get the BeeB. I later worked repairing BBC computers and went on training courses at Acorn in Cambridge which was amazing as we got to meet the people behind it.
Lovely video, I absolutely love my Elk too. I had a Beeb and Beeb Master growing up and never saw one back in the day. I've only just got mine working (built my own ULA and everything to get it running!) and it really impressed me with how complete it's Operating system, BASIC is and keyboard is, totally agree that it feel like a proper productive computer compared to the other home micros. I could certainly imagine doing serious things with it, back in the day, as you could with the Beeb. Colour clash aside I still don't think it can game as hard as the Spectrums best, but it does have a cracking Library of its own: Danger UXB, Galaga and Cyclone attack some of my personal faves. Ta!
In my circle of friends and classmates, the Commodore 64 ruled with the spectrum in second place. One poor neighbor had an electron. He was on an island. Not much information about it, no software in the shops, no pirated games to exchange with his friends.
The Slogger Turbo has 8 K of SRAM in it - that would cost more than the four 8K DRAM chips put together. Eight 8K DRAM chips would have been nice, but the timing would be unlikely. (Small point of pedantry: BBC BASIC does not have the LINE command - you need MOVE and DRAW (or PLOT or VDU)).
As I remember it, the Electron was perceived as a “cut down“ BBC Micro. This is an era when most of the ‘cheap’ versions of micros were seen to be false economy. (The Commodore 16 was an example of this.) At the time, the people I discussed computers with dismissed the Electron because it was seen as a poor man’s BBC. Sadly, that meant the woeful 48K Spectrum was somehow seen as more desirable!
I think the decision on stock ports was a bid odd - they were building a cost-reduced home computer for the UK market. 99% of people would be using the RF output and they could have got away with just that. Instead on a system where space and money for ports was at a premium they included all 3 of the display outputs from the BBC Micro. Yet they *didn't* include a joystick port as standard on a system which would be predominantly used for games (something I think already acknowledged by then to be a mistake on the Spectrum). They probably didn't even have to go as far as providing the full analogue interface from the BBC which really only ended up being a joystick port by accident anyway (so they could still have done this on the Plus 1 for people who needed the analogue port for other purposes). Putting a simple Atari-style interface on the electron as standard would have more useful than an RGB output.
Your right the BBCs joystick arrangment was vastly over the top for what you needed, there is an ADC driving it. I supect they figured if the spectrum managed with requiring an addon for joystrick suport they would be OK too. I did have a joystick for mine (as I had the plus1), but oddly for most games on the electron I preferred the keyboard. Probably due to the analogue nature of the joystick feeling a bit wooly for alot of games.
@@RetroBytesUK I do wonder if maybe one red line drawn was that whilst the Electron could be cut down from the BBC, it absolutely could not have a feature which the BBC didn't have? I can't think of any other credible reason why having a simple microswitch digital joystick continuing to be shoehorned into running off the analogue port rather than just using an Atari interface would continue to be the solution on a machine marketed at people who would predominantly use it to play games.
@@chriswathen9612 I wonder if software compatibility with the BBC is why they went that way for the plus1. Save having to write different joystick routines for the electron and BBC verisons of games.
I went from ZX81 to Oric-1 to Electron (and later BBC B). The Elk was a massive upgrade from the earlier machines (even though I never had any of the addons), and I *really* appreciated that proper keyboard. BBC Basic was the best, and remained so into the Archimedes era where it could be used to write full-on performant GUI apps.
Thanks to Richard Russell (who did the orginal z80 verison of BBC basic) we now have versions for Linux, Windows, OS X, and modern browsers. All the risc os stuff for gui will works, so anything written then is basic for the archinedes can now just run on any of those platforms. He also added opengl support, so you can do modern 3d stuff in it.
@@RetroBytesUK The RISC OS GUI stuff won't work on Richard's BBC BASIC versions (nor Matrix Brandy) since they use RISC OS operating system calls that aren't implemented on any other platform. But, straight single-tasking full-BASIC programs will. (Oh, and programs with inline assembly won't work either.) But yes, thanks to him and another developer we have TWO BBC BASIC implementations for modern hardware. .... and I'm daft enough to have written a new piece of educational software that will run on any 32K BBC or Electron (with disc interface) and anything newer than that which has BBC graphics support (sorry, Sinclair Z88 users)...
That was a brilliant video, didn't know about the Acorn Electron so, thx for enhancing my knowledge of British home-computers. But what made me wonder, talking from a German perspective, that you didn't mention the Amstrad CPC line at all, especially as another low-cost British home-computer at its time that took a lot of its design hints from the BBC Micro and the Locomotive Basic was pretty good, much better then C64 ones. Was easy extensible and it had a real OS/Firmware not depending on BASIC for its I/O like the C64 did. Case in point that the CPC was my first computer I had as a teen and was compared to Sinclair or Acorn pretty successful on the European market, only beaten by the C64.
The only reason I did not mention the CPC with regards to the electron, is that the electron came out a year or two before the first model of the CPC. Thus the CPC did not figure in Acorns thinking.
I was lucky enough to get a BBC Model B but I remember how it was a joint Christmas present between my parents and grandparents, so that says something about how much that computer cost back in the 80's. I can only remember one person at school with an Acorn Electron, I think most had C64s or Spectrums, but I do remember someone having a Dragon computer.
Let's not forget an earlier Acorn machine, the Atom. This also had a built in Assembler and BASIC. It was my first home computer and at the time was very impressive and one of the only computers to have a proper keyboard! I remember adding a colour board and BBC BASIC to it at a later stage.
The Electron was/is a fantastic little machine! I spent literally hours and hours programming on mine, in both Basic and assembly language. I also played games too, of course! My favourites were Repton, Thrust, Chuckie Egg, and Gisburne's Castle. I sold it not too long ago as the ULA had died making it completely unusable, and then bought a BBC Model B from eBay. I lusted after one back in the 80s but could only ever afford the Electron instead. Nevertheless, I will always remember the Electron with much affection.
I worked at a school in London and the management at Acorn were surprisingly approachable when you spoke about education, but start talking home/game computer and it was obvious they had no interest.
As someone who programs firmware I can sympathies sometimes I can't fit an in-circuit debugger so I will use a status LED or something similar to see if my code work to that point
A 4 bit memory is half as fast as an 8 bit memory if you use the same timing for both. But using the page mode in DRAMs you can make a 4MHz memory look like a 8MHz one in special cases (which is how the ARM2 had an average of 6MHz memory access speed) so the slowdown in getting the two halves of a byte for the processor or blocks of data for the video was not as bad as it would first seem.
The ULA does effectively use a form of page mode in the sense that it preserves the row address and issues consecutive column addresses for the two 4-bit transfers involved in transferring a byte. It seems like a great way of getting higher bandwidth from the RAM, and the ULA is indeed fully able to transfer 8 bits in a 2MHz cycle. So, that makes the high-bandwidth screen modes possible with only four RAM chips. However, this timing regime and the need for the ULA to perform the transfers on the CPU's behalf means that complete transfers between the CPU and RAM are not possible within a single 2MHz cycle: the ULA cannot deliver the entire byte within the CPU's timing schedule. So, by adopting this technique, which seems like a great hack, the designers condemned the CPU to always access the built-in RAM at one byte per 1MHz cycle. Although the CPU can access upper memory at 2MHz, and this will provide some performance benefits, it will spend a lot of its time running at 1MHz, which means that the benefits of having a 2MHz CPU are somewhat reduced. It just shows that some optimisations and supposed efficiencies can end up having the opposite effect and compromising the end result. And it may have increased the ULA's complexity as well.
I remember reading numerous articles in the monthly Electron programming magazines about trying to implement solutions in software to emulate some of the missing graphics features that were in the BBC, like mode 7 & sidewards scrolling. To this day I still think this was a mistake by Acorn to not have these features, as was the reduction of sound to 1 channel. However, BBC Basic and the built in assembler were absolutely the best out there for 8 bit home machine, and probably were responsible for creating an entire generation of professional programmers.
I would agree. When your target market is more likely to play games than do anything else, why would you accept an implementation that had missing graphics features and inferior sound? Having the same graphics & sound as the BBC Micro should have been top of the list of things that could not be cut out.
@@chriswathen9612 I think the targeting of games is a big part of why acorn decided to drop mode7. As very few games on the BBC used mode 7, as it does not really do graphics in that mode but graphic characters. It was a mode that was mostly used by applications, and educational software.
I think the big issue with it is that they discontinued it too early. Commodore, Amstrad and Sinclair kept theirs going and rode the wave with the 8-bit resurgence of '87/'88 when the game consoles(Atari 2600 not withstanding) hadn't entered Europe yet and parents were looking for a gaming system for their kids that cost less than an Amiga. That's how I ended up with a C64. Me dad asked me what looked better of the 3 systems available at a price he could afford and the Spectrum and Amstrad didn't impress, the hardware sprites and sound really won it for 5 year old me. I think if the Electron, it may have had Amstrad's place in that.
They really missed out on that window where amstrad and other squeesed a bit more life out of the 8bit systems when it comes to the electron. They did produce the Master during that period to keep education sales flowing. I think they where stretched fairly thin doing the master and ARM.
@@RetroBytesUK I remember that period quite well, swapping tapes on the yard like they were football stickers, then making copies on our dad's hi-fis when we got home. We had it organised(well, for primary schoolers) by the end. We'd meet in town and pool our money together on a Saturday morning, one of us going to Dixons to get a pack of tapes and the rest of us going to Boots and picking the best games(usually bad arcade ports and licenced games by US Gold or Ocean) from the £1.99 rack that none of us owned. Then we'd spend the afternoon doing high speed dubbing on someone's dad's fancy £1k Sony hi-fi(had to use normal speed on the lower end players, took hours) and the evening playing.
It's only worth keeping old models in production if they have a decent library of software available. Also older designs aren't always cheaper to manufacture. Part of the reason the C128 was discontinued was that the legacy components made it cost as much as an Amiga to produce.
BBC BASIC was the best version. PROC was so much more sophisicated than using just GOTO, and routines like RENUM to properly list your BASIC code in evenly spaced numbers, show me another BASIC that did that..? And those shortcuts on the Electron keys, not even the BBC had those to save on typing. Something in common with those Spectrum users after all...
Excellent video. Nothing controversial at all (I agree with all your points 🙂) I had an Electron, with a Plus 1 and the PRES AP3/4 disc interface that you referred to. Also had View, Viewsheet and Click ROMs and, for a time, the Slogger Plus 2, which was a circuit board to sit between the Electron and Plus 1 and gave it another two cartridge ports. It was designed to go into Slogger's RX case which I didn't have, so the whole thing was a bit of a wobbly mess with it installed. Eventually upgraded to a BBC Master, which was like the Electron with no compromises and everything included.
I really like the Master too. I eventually could not resist buying a master and I picked one up in 2004 for £15. I then kept finding lots of Acorn stuff for sale going for at what felt like very little money, but those selling it just thought of it as junk and where happy to just get rid of it and get a few quid in return.
Excellent. The Electron and its ULA had problems, sure, but has always been a bit of a scapegoat for Acorn's mismanagement. Nice to see this part of the story being told.
Its alot easier to go with the ULA took too long, rather than saying Acorns growth has out stripped managements ability to scale with it.
Queued up for one at a launch locally managed to get one. It played Elite, very happy and it was very capable for its time. No regrets. Sold it later to a friend and he still has it.
I was a Sinclair fan, I owned a ZX81, ZX Spectrum and even a QL... before going all Amiga. I missed the whole BBC thing at schools, literally a year too old. Recently, I bought a BBC Model B and I was so amazingly impressed, the fact that it can do a load of stuff today is incredible and you can most certainly see the Raspberry Pi heritage in there... So I then acquired an Electron and I was equally impressed, for a low cost machine, it was really good. As a teenager when I was in my Sinclair days, I would never admit the Acorn computers were any good (just like all bands other than Duran Duran were terrible), but this machine was better than my Spectrum and really good value, the engineers did an amazing job... add the Acorn Interface Plus 1 and you are getting closer to a BBC with sideways ROM! I always enjoy your videos, keep up the good work and I appreciate your different lens on the Electron story. Top video!
Oh... and I agree on the BBC Basic comment, by teenage self is squirming at me saying so. The ability to embed machine code was amazing and the whole sideways ROM's was so ahead of it's time.
I was a little hesitatent to do comparisions with other systems, but its hard to convey how good a job they did without doong so.
@@RetroBytesUK I think some of the problem was companies insisting on using Microsoft Basic. Computers like the Vic20 had 24K of ROM in which they implemented Microsoft basic. It was really incredible to see sinclair get basic into 4K and 8K ROMS in comparison. Mind blowing. Acorn really tried to make the most of their ROM space to really do things so it had some nice features. The inline assembler is an especially great one.
@@TheDaleyChannel yeah with most micros you could embed the data in your Basic program and Poke the values into memory that way. I think the ability to do conditional compiling (If...then etc) and use the values from variables from your basic code was a real killer feature for a home micro!
I now own a beautifully refurbished BBC Master 128 after recently asking my father to get all my collected computer gear down from the loft where I'd lovingly stored it in boxes from the 80s until the early 00s.
After fobbing me off for a while complaining that he was too busy (bear in mind he's long retired sooooo, uh huh 😒) it finally comes to light that he'd thrown it all in the bin.
With the excuse of, "it's my house, I'll do whatever I feel like 🤷♂️".
So there went my:
BBC Model B + ROMs
5¼" drive + media
Colour dot matrix
Cub monitor
2mb BBC Archimedes A3000 + sampler & midi podule
Multi-sync monitor
90s era Cyrix 150 PC with Rage 128 GPU and various other bits
Another very high quality monitor (1280x1024 all the way down to MAME's slow-scan arcade modes, that one REALLY stings)
So, all in all, what a few grand worth of stuff to replace.
_Cheers Dad_ 🤬🖕
Anyway, um, oh yes, _the point_
So now I have a BBC Master and those cartridge slots are _calling_ to me.
I'm designing sound and graphics expansion hardware (although a lot of it is learning at the moment, I'm no electronics engineer, yet)
In the expansion slot there's audio in and out pins, so you can take the output before it hits the speaker, mix it or process it and then send it on its way.
So, how about a Yamaha OPL2 cartridge? Or a digital FX cartridge for adding reverb?
It's almost trivial.
And then there's graphics, I think I can add a second 6502, a GPU, whose only job is to process graphical commands sent by the main CPU into a local RAM buffer. Tyre GPU will have its own local ROM that implements the GPU assembled commands.
The big difference is there's no video I/O pins on the cartridge, it'll require a fly lead from the BBC's RGB out to an RGB in on the cartridge and then mix the two together into a combined output.
I haven't looked at the electrons expansion capability but with that expansion box you can get for it this might work on there too, although the pinout is a bit different so maybe it'll need a different PCB board with some pins swapped.
Soooo, thanks dad?
Actually no, no no, uh uh, no. 😂
As a Spectrum kid back in the day, I never realised how capable the Electron really was - the BBC was for kids whose parents worked in tech or had better cars than we did, and I suspect the BBC was always "Dad's computer" really. But the Speccy was *ours* and it was a lot of fun. The Electron didn't get much coverage from what I remember, and I think it was often associated with the BBC and therefore had the taint of being 'something to do with school', so I only had one friend with one. And that was lumped with a greenscreen monitor, so I always thought it was monochrome like the ZX81. Ha! Have to say, the ability to use assembly inline in BASIC would have been a gamechanger on any machine. Brilliant idea. Much easier to debug than pages of hexadecimal. I'm still scarred by erntering long listings from magazines in that format...
Outside of the likes of Acorn user, the electron really did struggle to get coverage in magazines, and you're right the association with school probably did not help.
It's great to see a video that doesn't just simplistically blame the Electron for Acorn's financial problems; it didn't help, but it wasn't the sole issue. And thanks for showing the ElkSD, it's always pleasing to see my designs in videos!
Thanks for putting it together for us, I've got a lot of use out of that cartridge, it really does make life so much easier.
Great video on my much loved Acorn Electron. When I wanted to upgrade from a ZX81 I had looked at my friends computers (Spectrum and BBC B), and thought how much better the BBC B was, but the price was an issue. The Electron coming out clinched it for me. I used it for around 9 years before buying a PC. Bought the Plus 1 immediately when it was released. I wanted a disk drive, but the cost was too high back then.
As a young kid I accompanied my Dad to Acorn HQ to pick up some pre-print galleys from John Coll for one of the Beeb manuals (the non-provisional User Guide maybe?) and they let me have a go on a prototype Electron. It probably didn’t go down too well when I had a bit of a hissy fit over its lack of MODE 7. All user feedback is good, I guess!
Might be why I ended up with a Beeb for my birthday rather than an Electron as planned.
Definitely a hissy fit that was worth it. As an electron kids I really missed having mode 7.
Great video! I agree with you on BASIC, came across it after I upgraded from a C64 to the Archimedes 3000 and was blown away by it's features. Then I was born a second time when I realized that it had been used on all the Acorn 8 But models as well.
So I was really happy when I found an Electron among the computers O rescued from being scrapped. Only thing I need is a Plus One. And a LISP cartridge, because I love this language. IMO it's the most underrated programming languages of all time. Granted, most people are taken aback by all the parenthesis, and it really needs some getting used to them. But they are an essential component of structuring code and data. LISP (and Common Lisp nowadays) still had features that sets it apart from most other programming languages.
Friend of mine had an Electron, it certainly gave the BBC experience in a more humble package. In this day and age, I much prefer the small form factors of such kit… but then again, I had (and loved) a CBM Plus/4 back in the day.
As a (nearly retired) software engineer, I’d say there are some really amazing things about the BBC and Electron hardware & software architecture - to my mind, the sideways ROM system and 2nd processor concept are probably my top features. BBC BASIC is a wonder, although I always question the 'BBC BASIC is twice as fast' when it ran on hardware twice as fast as other 6502 systems of the time 😉 … it’s other features like structured programming and the assembler deserve the hype. Sadly when it came to user interface, Acorn were still stuck with a paper terminal mentality and its 'copy key' editing reflects that.
The BBC and Electron modern online community seems filled with friendly enthusiasts helping people keep this venerable old kit alive, supplemented with modern additions to help in a world where the supporting kit is ever harder to come by.
Another fantastic video! I do love the level of detail you go down to!
"A keyboard that didn't suck"
Absolutely right on that count, sir. I never owned an Acorn (BBC or otherwise), but I did a ZX-Spectrum. I have not-so-fond memories of separating the layers of the keyboard and fixing the conductors with aluminum foil, and when that stopped working, silver paste.
Thanks for the mention buddy!
Any time, I was hoping it might push some traffic your way. Unfortunately this video is not doing overly well so it might not push the needle on your elementum video.
I remember when was in Year 9 and we did an Insight Into Industry project while Year 10 were on work experience and Year 11 were doing exams.
Our Insight Into Industry thing involved brewing beer (which we sadly never got to try) marketing it and this also involved visitng an independent brewery called the Big Lamp Brewery in Newcastle's West End that one of our teachers (Mr Hanson, a physics teacher from Yorkshire) was friends with the management.
The entire brewing process was being ran by an Acorn Electron and this would have been the early 1990s! I suppose it's what you would have expected from a brewery ran by British schoolteachers! They knew the BBC Micro and the Elk was a cheaper version of that!
What a fantastic (and complete!!) introduction to the Electron and its history. Very informative and delivered in an engaging way!
Snapper (Pac-man) was so good in the first release that Acornsoft were required to re-release it with updated graphics. In the first release (only available for the BBC) the graphics for Pac-man and the ghosts were near 100% identical to the arcade.
Ditto Acorn's Defender and Scramble, which had to be renamed Planetoid and Rocket Raid.
My Electron's ULA was either crashing or corrupting the MODE 0-2 displays until it died after a couple of years out of warranty, but my dad somehow found another system board which thankfully had a better Ferranti ULA that stayed working.
Excellent video as always. The Electron was my very first computer so it has a special place in my heart! I wouldn't be where I am today without this humble machine 😁
Its the same for me, without the humble little Elk I don't think I would have the interest in computers I now do. It was just a great little machine that I feel has been misrepresented at lot on YT.
I got an Issue 6 dirt cheap as a repair in 1986, which allowed me to do BBC BASIC programming for Computer Graphics 1 & 2 in my digs at Uni. Since it was mostly heavy lifting on matrix maths, the elk was fine - I then just had to programme the output on the Micro Lab's BBC Master at the end (although the prototyping of what I wanted was simplified on the Elk, due to the heavily structured BASIC.
It's still going strong now, and i've added a few toys that weren't available in the 80s.
As to games - Elite and Robotron were the most played. I had the Bud joystick cart that worked pretty well with Robotron.
Excellent detailed video about Acorn and the Electron! Thanks for mentioning some of my games 👍
Well thanks for the games, my eldest is now obessed with playing elecrobots. I need to get an emulator running on his vita so I can have my laptop back. Hope you enjoyed your holiday over here.
@@RetroBytesUK Or let him play on the Electron itself 😄 We very much enjoyed our summer holiday in the UK and I especially liked finally visiting the computer museum in Cambridge!
@@0xC0DE Not to pump your tyres up too much, but your games are brilliant. 👍
@@OzRetrocomp That's very kind of you, my friend! 🤗
I can remember developing a floppy disk drive interface for an Electron way back at university. Bought a BBC Model B with first pay packet as a result, went on to ARM machines and ended up helping introduce ARM processors into Philips Semiconductors while working at Philips.
Now there is a good claim to fame. I'm sure ARM did quiet well out of that introduction.
A brilliant video on one of my favourite 8-bit machines of all time (well equal favourite with the BBC Micro and BBC Master if I'm completely honest!).
Fun fact: The Barson Econet interface... that was aimed mainly at the Australian market. The BBC Micro was extremely popular with the education sector down here, and that Econet adapter was designed to help bring the cost down of setting up Econet networks in schools. I'm not sure how many were sold and I've never seen one in the wild, but IIRC the schematics for this adapter were published on Stardot a couple of years back.
The cartridge based econet interface some one on slashdot put together works rather well, assuming the Barson interface worked as well it makes for a good econet station.
Love the long form technical deep dive. Love the dry humour - not often I laugh out loud when I'm on my own. Thanks for the great documentary :)
Thanks I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I always did enjoy the early Acorn naming scheme. Atom, Proton, Electron. Of course it's less obvious where to go after that... the neutrino? The quark? I can understand why they branched-out into other product lines with different naming schemes.
The Agon Light modern 8bit computer runs BBC BASIC and the operating system is called "Quark MOS". I don't think that's a coincidence...
It's true regarding the excellent Electron and BBC Micro keyboards- the Spectrum was created to be cheaper, and with that you'd get a dead-flesh keyboard. At least Acorn still provided a cheaper Electron computer with a great keyboard.
Yes, about the time the spectrum had a full keyboard and the Electron was still more expensive and had less RAM and resolution.
Amazing to think that the 80's version of "here" debugging was an essential tool!
Love it! I started with ZX81 and then later Speccy back in early 1980 in Poland and due to embargo it’s was very hard to get any computers and they came kind of delayed by 2-3 years to Poland mostly brought in by folks travelling from outside the communist block so I never heard about Acorn computers until the retro scene picked up but I love this machine and it’s system flexibility. Lots of memory, superb Basic and good keyboard would make me a very happy kid as I didn’t have many games for ZX81 and had to program them myself:) but these were the times we used to live in and even ZX81 with 1kb made me happy back then so just imagine if I had this machine ;) and I think I’m going to get one to play with! Great video, Thank you!
Finally, a proper review with the machine history and technical details. Thank you.
i'm a United States guy… So my experience was mainly with the Commodore 64 and it's ilk... This was both a great introduction and a great overview of the acorn systems… I am really impressed both with your presentation and with this computer… Continued success! Oh, and I'm subscribed!
Top video, took me back to my teenage years getting an Acorn Electron to replace my ZX81, great little machine.
Playing around with the in built BASIC started me on the career that I am still doing to this day.
I find it really interesting that as an Austrian getting a C64 in 1988 I had never heard of the BBC and Electron before rather recent UA-cam videos. The Archimedes showed up in some magazines, as well as some Sinclair Spectrums, but Acorn's 8-bit aera went by completely unnoticed here. Many thanks for your excellent videos!
Anybody remember the song "Hey hey 16K"? It had the lyric "Acorn Electron - cheaper BBC micro". I think that was the problem around perception, ultimately. Cheaper versions of an existing home micro sounded commercially sensible, but never sold well. The 16K version of the Spectrum never sold in the same volumes as the 48K version, for example. In fact, it might've been the 16K version that spurred on the sales of the 48K version, because people realised spending a little more got them a lot more in terms of computing power. Ditto with Commodore's attempts after the C64 to produce cutdown versions like the Plus 4 and Commodore 16. Atari 800 and 400? Same story.
If Acorn had dropped the sound functionality from the ULA and just use the normal TI sound chip, it would have helped eliminate the ULA constraints and allowed the Electron to have its full BBC sound system. Yes it would have added a little to production cost, but it would have also helped it sell more machines and at the same time lower development cost.
There's an anniversary panel with Sophie Wilson, Chris Curry and some other Acorn luminaries, and that's one of the ideas Chris Curry mentions they could have done had they not been so slavish about sticking to the price point they'd envisioned.
@@failedstateupdateadding another 64x4 dram chip would have doubled the speed of machine code games as well.
You’re incorrect about the screen modes in Elite using less memory for the colour section. The colour section is half the resolution of the B&W section, but has TWICE the number of colours. Therefore it requires the exact same amount of RAM.
Where the BBC wins here is that it can change the width of the screen to use less memory overall due to having a 6845 video controller. On the BBC the mode 4 screen is reprogrammed to be only 256 pixels across with wider hardware borders, but on the Electron the ULA only permits full width screen mode 4 with a full 320 pixels. The wider border has to be implemented by “wasting” screen memory, instead of being provided at no cost by the hardware.
You can also switch modes mid-screen with the Electron, but the hardware gives you limited support with the timing. Generally, games relied on various fixed interrupts to do mid-screen tasks, often enabling or disabling the palette in order to hide data stored in the screen memory. Some authors went quite a bit further with a strict timing regime to perform tasks at scanline-level resolution.
Indeed, the video shows Firetrack which switched between two modes with different memory requirements and characteristics in order to perform the vertical scrolling, and this was probably one of the most accomplished ULA hacks that we know of. Unfortunately, the Firetrack footage seems to have been recorded without "locking" the sync, which was something that occasionally needed to be done manually by pressing a key after starting the game, so there is a certain amount of glitching being shown.
Actually you are incorrect in your B&W vs colour calculation. Halving the resolution doesn't just halve the horizontal pixel count it also halves the vertical count resulting a quarter of the total pixel count. So after doubling the bits per pixel you still end up halving the memory needed. Similarly going from mode 0 to mode 2 would result in a 1:16 pixel ratio with 1:4 bpp for 75% a saving of memory.
@@MikePerigo Nope. All standard BBC and Electron graphics modes had 256 pixels of the exact same height (2 interlaced scan lines) in the vertical direction (32 6845 character rows of 8 pixels each, at least in non-US models). I should clarify that when I said “half the resolution” I meant half in the x-axis *only.* TBH I took it as generally understood that the Beeb platform as a whole doesn’t permit vertical resolution changes in *any* graphics mode. You can have roughly square 1:1 pixels (modes 1 and 4), 2:1 pixels (modes 2 and 5), and 0.5:1 pixels (mode 0). Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
@@stuartmcconnachie Apologies. I had forgotten that the Beeb never changes the vertical resolution. I also forget which modes are being selected in this case. Modes 0 and 1 trade horizontal resolution for colour and use the same amount of memory (20k/screen) but mode 5 doubles the colours for a quarter of the horizontal pixels and only uses half the amount of memory. If Electron Elite isn't doing a mode 0/5 switch then I wonder what else could be using more of the available memory that necessitated the excision of game features.
@ The Beeb has the 6845 CRTC (Cathode Ray Tube Controller) which allows the user to change multiple aspects of how the video signal is constructed. One thing you can change is the number of “characters” per row of the screen. In this context a “character” is a single byte, however many pixels a byte may generate in the given mode. In “regular” modes this is set to 80 (modes 0, 1 and 2 and 3) or 40 (modes 4, 5 and 6). In Elite (mode 4/5) this 6845 register is reprogrammed to 32 which gives 32x8=256 pixels instead of the normal 40x8=320 pixels of the regular mode.
Effectively this means on the Beeb the screen is 32 bytes wide by 256 rows = 8K, instead of 40 bytes by 256 rows = 10K.
The electron in contrast lacks that bit of specialised hardware and instead the role of the CRTC is performed by circuitry in the Electron ULA. It’s a much more basic affair, and the screen width is fixed at either 40 or 80 characters. It can NOT be programmed to any other arbitrary values. This means the mode 4 screen still takes up the whole 10K of RAM. The unused 40-32=8 characters (64 pixels) are still present on each row, and have to be filled with zeros. Wasted space that can be reclaimed on the Beeb where the zeros are generated by the 6845 hardware as an extension of the left and right border areas.
Currently have 2 x Electrons + 1 x plus 1. I recently bought an Elksd128 and a Slogger Pegasus. It was the first computer we had in our household, But we didn't have the plus one. We bought our Electron before the plus 1 had been released(unfortunately). I'm glad to see and here that people are still making games and hardware for retro 8 bit machines. Excellent video, loved it.
When I was at uni in 1987 studying comp sci, I got into an argument with the principle lecturer about the nature of structured programming. A big fan of Pascal, he insisted that it wasn't possible to create bug-free progams in languages such as C or BASIC. I disagreed, claiming that I could write a version of one of the main 1st year projects in BASIC (for my Electron) which, using the design methods he was teaching, would run first time with no errors (barring any initial data entry typos).
In other words, the entire program would be written without ever touching a computer, not tested until it was completely finished, because his conceptual idea was that the solution to a problem should be viable on any funcionally capable system, ie. a way of encouraging students to approach problem solving without becoming restricted in their thinking by the limitations and nuance of the target hardware. The idea has merit, but I was certain one didn't have to be using a language which by its nature kinda imposed a structured approach.
And so I did write the program, it did run first time on my Electron without error, likewise on a Beeb at the uni, the code was clear, structured, everything the lecturer wanted, and he did concede the point. However, I suppose I had the advantage of using a BASIC which came with a number of facilities that encouraged structured programming, such as procedures. I wrote various things for the C64 and I suspect that version of BASIC may have been a bit more challenging, typical code awash with GOTO and GOSUB. I also had the advantage of having earlier supplied my school with numerous programs for teaching, including a chemistry database and a math fractions program for the remedial class, so I already had some experience writing code which had to be reliable but also portable (I used an Electron, but all the systems at school were Beebs). I wrote lots of games, started working with machine code, was just getting properly into 3D (focusing on CAD & design programs) before going to uni, where it all kinda fell by the wayside after 2nd year due to lack of time (I stupidly never sent any program examples to a magazine or publisher; the untrodden path in life).
Writing for the Electron was very rewarding, especially that leap in what was possible when first trying machine code, in my case used to accelerate screen fill routines for onscreen menu selection. A perpetual problem though was data storage, ie. saving stuff on tapes, years of battling with mono tape decks (who remembers "Data Recorders", the b.s. label slapped onto cheap mono decks and sold to home micro users as if they were designed specifically for computers? What a ripoff!); it wasn't until much later that I discovered recordings worked way better with a reasonable hifi deck. Before then, well, my brother recall's my once threatening my Electron with a screwdriver if it didn't damn well load a very large program after the ninety bajillionth attempt (a version of Monopoly typed in from a magazine), which as it happens it finally did. Dare I say the dreaded words, "Data: rewind tape!". To this day I don't know why it never occured to me to try using a lower baud rate. Thankfully, much later I obtained a Beeb and was able to rescue almost all the programs by moving them over to floppies. Now I have a large collection of both systems, including Plus1s, a Plus3, Plus5, also Masters, Arcs and so on. Still no Atom though, hard to find for a price that doesn't sting the eyes.
My original Electron doesn't work anymore (I simply wore it out), but I am determined to repair it. I have many other units to act as parts donors if need be.
I've talked about this many times with people of similar age (I'm 53), there was something quite unique about that time period in the 1980s, the ability to get close to the hardware when writing programs, to take a device which on its own wasn't doing anything and then bring it to life via one's own imagination and effort through coding. I think I enjoyed the process of writing programs more than using the end results though, eg. my friends liked playing the games I wrote more than I did, perhaps because I knew too much about how they worked, often the extremely simple rules that made possible seemingly complex but effective behaviour, though even I found it hard to beat my implementation of Battleships. :D
Of my friends circle at school, I was the only one who had an Electron; everyone else, if they had something at all, owned a Beeb, C64, Spectrum, Oric or Dragon32. Not much variation beyond that though, I lived on an island so there was little choice beyond rare travel to a mainland store. I remember initially really wanting an Enterprise 128, but that came out way too late, and with hindsight I was better off with the Electron, though I did obtain a complete Enterprise eventually for my collection.
You mentioned the compact form factor of the Electron, something which for me perhaps led to a particular bias that I don't really understand, namely, I have no interest in any home micro where the keyboard is separate from the system. I have no idea why, somehow it just doesn't seem the same. So the Beeb, Master, Arc and likewise C64/128, Amiga 1200, 1040ST, C64, CPC464, Spectrum +3 and dozens of others, I love them all, especially the ST which I used extensively at uni, writing the largest 3rd year project ever submitted (68K assembly). But the models with a separate keyboard, like the later Amigas, or the RISC PC (I have one, will probably sell it), meh, somehow they just don't grab me. Can't explain why, there's just something about the single unit nature of most home micros that I find particularly appealing. Am I alone in this perception?
So here's to the Electron, because without it I would never have gone to uni, never gotten so involved with Doom and the N64, and never discovered SGIs which has been my main thing ever since. Being able to use tech back then in such a manner was inspiration for so many in later life. I can't imagine how that can be possible now in any equivalent form, with everything being so black box and more complicated. It's perfectly possible to learn and understand how an 80s micro works; can't do that with a modern smartphone, nor with any kind of PC beyond just a bare bones functional block diagram. There is of course the Pi scene, and PC benchmarking/overclocking (which I do now aswell sometimes), but it's not the same thing. The 80s was unique, for both home micro coding, typing listings in from magazines or even the TV, cheap games, and messing about with electronics, the latter not yet at a stage of complexity that meant opening up devices was pointless; who else used to roam landfill sites looking for tape decks, VCRs, hifi units, laserdisc players, radios, etc., to take them home, take them apart, desolder stuff, create new things, drive one's parents crazy with the smell of solder, bits everywhere, whacko inventions and the occasional minor explosion? :D Can't do that anymore, modern consumer devices are just a couple of blank ICs, SMCs and some glue logic, very little in the way of anything one can meddle with to create new things, or even just repair what one finds. Even my gf commented with much surprise at just how little was inside her mother's DVD player when I opened it up to try and fix a signal fault, the machine could easily have been half the size it was.
Long live the Electron, and, frankly, all home micros from that time, because it was an awesome era to be alive and able to use them in the ways so many of us did. It's funny that at the time there was always so much playground argument about which system was better, but looking back I think it's great they all existed. I've enjoyed reading the memories of others here; next year, or perhaps 2025, I intend collating such memories for a vintage museum site. Anyone else here remember looking forward to the next issue of Input magazine?
Lastly, my own controversial opinion: I played Elite do death on my Electron, likewise on a Beeb later, and I have half a dozen versions for other 80s micros aswell, but my favourite version is for the C64. It just has a certain something I can't describe, perhaps in part the music (Commodore sure nailed it with the SID).
The '80s were exciting times for home computing enthusiasts, new machines coming out with great new features, and Acorn were right up there and the BBC model B was superb. I never owned one, I'd already spent all my cash on an Apple ][, but the company I worked for in the '80s and '90s used a lot of them in all manner of applications and I had a lot of fun writing that stuff, very powerful machines for their time. I'm pleased that there's still a lot of interest in these old machines, each of them tells a story and will have a special place in their owners hearts.
Actually... yes, BBC BASIC was the best, as was the keyboard. For a while I think I ran mine with a BBC Forth ROM as the start language (I could be wrong, but I know I used Forth for a while). Wouldn't have had my career if it wasn't for my school's adoption of Acorn machines, a teacher whose name has temporarily gone missing but who was super enthusiastic and encouraging and my parents who "happily" bought me a BBC B. Played with Electrons in the school lab but always went back to the warm embrace of the Beeb.
Great perspective. The BBC Micro appeared in my school as I was starting my ‘A’ levels, we were already programming on the Research Machines 380-Z and yes the version of Basic was the best I encountered. Including assembler support was a genius move so when I went on to Uni I already knew 6502 and Z80 learnt Z80 on the 380-Z (although not nearly as seamless and simple experience…). That may also explain why my results… weren’t the best!
Love your channel mate, this one was a great perspective on an underrated machine
Nice touch with the Django Reinhardt music!
I lost it at your “big but’s” comment.
Loving your content 😎👍
Fantastic video, very honest appraisal of acorn history. Love it, all the reasons why I valued the electron but never bought one with real money.
£399 for bbc b in 1982 is like spending £1800 today. Electron offered much more affordable computing with a half decent keyboard.
I had an Electron and loved it. The BBC Basic was good and I even managed to program a couple of games with it. Then I got the BBC Master Compact....
Fascinating. I nearly went for the Electron back in the day but ended up getting the Speccy.
"We go dowmarket?!" - H. Hauser, 1982
"the BASIC you kids were learning at school"... except we weren't.... most (all?) Scottish secondary schools were teaching COMAL and not BASIC.... however I have no idea what they were doing south of the border. What I do know is due to this not only did the school machines all have the COMAL rom, other machines that we could access like those in libraries had COMAL roms. I have no idea if there was COMAL for the Electron, or even if the BBC one would work but none of the Electrons I came into contact with had it.
Neat, I'd never heard of COMAL. It looks like a big step up.
According to wikipedia, there was some form of COMAL for Electrons, as evidence by the existince of the book COMAL on the BBC Microcomputer and Acorn Electron SBD 19. Acornsoft. ISBN 978-0907876908. But who knows what sort of production it got into.
The Acornsoft COMAL did run on electron, however it was not cheap, so if you where in the market for a budget sysyem you may not have been COMAL user. It shipped as both disk and a language ROM.
I should mention COMAL was not available until 84, so schools would have needed to teach another language for the first few years of the BBC computer literacy project. All the school materials they made available where for Basic.
My high school in Scotland in around 1985 had a 'lab' fitted out with BBCs with Econet and a shared double hard disc drive as a network drive. We had one teacher who knew and understood them, so he knew the value of BBC basic - before him the school had an Apple ][ and a Commodore PET and no-one was allowed to touch them in case they got damaged (I remember some of the teachers played a keyboard-mashing 'Olympics' thing on one of them a fair bit though...
BBC BASIC was itself influenced by COMAL and had about 2/3 of the features so some schools (including mine) decided it was not worth the extra cost. On the Commodore PET (with its very limited BASIC) it was a more attractive option.
Great video. Got the Electron for Christmas when I was 8. Basic on that machine is what lead we to work in the software industry 40 years later.
(I sold it for a Spectrum +2 a few years later as it just didn't have enough games....or at least ones I could "swap" with my friends at school)
I had never heard much of the Electron until Adrian got one to repair. Your story was quite comprehensive thanks and I think I would have been happy with it, probably happier than with my Nascom 2 (so much to say about that) or my C64 and it's horrible keyboard.
Thanks for the interesting and informative video. My first computer was an electron but found it lacked the power of the Beeb at school and the games of my mates' Speccies. A jack of no trades. As soon as I could, I binned it for a CPC6128, which was the antithesis of the chopped down electron and had Locomotive Basic - arguably the next evolution of BBC basic.
I had to laugh at the irony of finding out that the all-white display for Elite took up more memory than the colour HUD of the Beeb version and that this was responsible for some of the omissions from the electron version. Talk about shooting yourself in both feet.
You missed the Oric-1… truly an AWFUL keyboard. Not a flat membrane, but the keys were extremely small, hard and painful to press. For me, it was the worst keyboard on the market. (The worst membrane keyboard was the Atari 400.)
Of all the computer kit I've owned over the years, the Electron is the one I've held on to, along with the Plus1 and Plus3, still bolted securely on the back. Got it down from the loft a few months ago and fired it up for the first time in about 30 years. Amazingly, it still worked fine and read the disks perfectly! Great piece of kit. Would have loved to have owned a BBC back in the day, but it was well beyond my price range, so the Electron it was.
The Electron was my first ever computer. I miss it so dearly. Though I suspect a reunion may not be as rose tinted as my memories as a child.
As an old programmer of the Elk, indeed having had an Electron way before I could afford a BBC, three cheers for saying what you said. It was a good bit of hardware - compromised, yes, but not in as many ways as people thought. My games used an interrupt to change colours and you could change modes too (I think, boy is my memory as failure-prone as a wibbly RAMpack on a ZX81 hoho) which could've given Elite the same colorful appearance as the Beeb version.
Most of my games stuck to Mode 5, with a colour change, and a screen at 20 character lines deep, as the same interrupt could turn all the colours to black, meaning you could store data on screen without it being visible - if only on the bottom, not covering sides or allowing narrower screensizes. Still it meant Barbarian and Last Ninja et al could run on either Beeb or Lekko with a few minor changes. Delete a tune here or there, enhance this or that if any memory left (usually no byte left unused though)
Anyhoo, many cheers, much more than three - say fifty-six? - for Mr Retrobytes.
The Memotech MTX series also had an inline assembler. Shame it was so unsuccessful.
A friend of mine has collected a few, from what he has told me they seam like a good machine.
They have a quadratic algorithm or two in the inline assembler (and disassembler) so editing an assembly line gets very slow as it gets bigger.
I loved my Electron ! I also spent hours on Elite, Jeff Minters Gridrunner and the best port of Defender I have seen. The inline assembler was so cool too. Great bit of history...cheers!
Here in New Zealand, we mostly had ZX81, Spectrum and C64. I had heard of Acorn, but I never saw one until my friend arrived from the UK with an Electron. We played on it sometimes, but I had so much more software for my Spectrum, and finding Acorn software was difficult here. I heard that a few of our schools had BBC micros, but still, I never saw one. Then one day, I was at a computer show and saw an Archimedes running Zarch. When I saw the price tag, I nearly died. Then Acorn were gone. That's basically how little headway they made into the NZ general market in my experience.
Acorn was a big supplier to the education market in New Zealand. We had a lab full of BBC Micros, and that eventually got replaced by an even larger lab of Archimedes A3000s and eventually an A5000 or something too I think. One of the teachers had a Master at home (compact I think), and a friend of mine had at least a RISC PC and an A4 I think (laptop Archimedes). But yeah I didn't know any families with Electrons nor A3010s (home version of A3000). Families went for Commodore.
@@MrKurtHaeusler Interesting. Of the other schools I visited, I never saw any. I certainly never saw one Acorn product at any friend's house. It was typically Apple, IBM, Sinclair, or Commodore. Schools were usually Apple or IBM/ clones. I would have loved to use BBCs at school. I guess they were too expensive for most schools.
Since you mentioned Elite, Alexander the OK did an excellent video on it, and it's a fascinating deep dive into the challenges facing a programmer in the age of the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron.
The game with the border (name escapes me at time of writing) reminded me of the game Revs, which got around memory limitations by using video memory to store data in the sky and then tricking the display into showing that area in blue. If the game crashed, the sky would be replaced with garbage.
The electron might have been a hobbled beeb, but it was still better than anything else for actually doing stuff on. It was only when I started messing with other 8-bit systems that I realised just how good us beeb users had it. Porting from bbc basic to any other flavour was awful, and usually just meant re-writing the whole damn thing!
Porting *any* BASIC to any *other* BASIC often meant rewriting the whole program - it was just how things were back then. If you were lucky, magazine listings would explain what the machine-specific PEEKs and POKEs did to try and aid translation to other machines, but it wasn't all that common.
@@dunebasher1971 I guess I should have said "re-structured" as that makes more sense.
I can't thumbs up this video a second time, but I can comment again after watching the video to the very end.
I'll do a search to see if you've done a video on the Oric-1, the keyboard was somewhere between dead-flesh and Electron, I learned 6502 machine code on it. Thank you so much for making these videos, I recently had a little rant about how some UA-camrs with a zero budget are making better content than the BBC...makers of Strictly, Mrs Brown's boys etc...
I watch WAY more content on here than I do BBC content thanks to channels like yours. ❤&✌
Edit: Found the Chuck Peddle video...
Ma and Pa bought mine from Co-Op as Acorn were trying to sell them off cheap! Got me into programming, basic, and computers... Thanks to the little Acorn Electron!
The ULA was the part which ultimately died in the end, absolute shame as I used the Elk all the way throughout the 80s into the early 90s.
Machine code was always a bit of a faff and in most cases, you would spend hours typing in listings and hours debugging the code, then save to cassette, then the code wouldn't load in from cassette... Fun? Hmmmm.. Kept me quiet for a few hours. The rear expansion port was also used with a "Commander" interface for joysticks!
You had to load a piece of code in first, then it would be 2 chances if worked.
Fascinating stuff! With Elite, losing the Thargons is OK.. but the local star though? Does that mean you can't use fuel scoops to refuel near the sun?
That in-line assembler is just lovely.... I typed in an assembler on the ZX Spectrum. It's pretty good! Or you hand assemble on graph paper, Sandy White style...
You still have the scoops for cargo, I never tried scouping fuel on the ecloectron version so you might not have been able to what with the local star not being present.
@@RetroBytesUKThat's cool. I remember it being risky as you could overheat as well!
Best mate had an Elk, I had a 464. Oh the long arguments about whether the structured basic beat the Locomotive built-in interrupts. Good times.
This is the best in depth look at a 80's computer I've seen, excellent work. It is a pity they didn't make the electron as a cost reduced BBC but 100% software compatible, while it did sell well, I would have thought many would have then bought it instead of saving up for a BBC.
I had an Acorn Electron and it was a fantastic wee machine. Personally, I would rate the Electron’s keyboard as the best I have ever used and preferred it over the BBC Micro. As for BASIC, the BBC version was/is excellent although I would give the edge to Z80 BASIC on the Amstrad CPC6128 (which I also had). Having said that, there is little between the versions and both are fine examples of 8 bit BASIC.
I can't pick the difference between the Elk keyboard and the Model B, though the former appears more impressive than the latter because nobody expects a computer that's as small as the Elk a keyboard of that calibre.
I didn’t have one of these…but I just watched all this with interest! Good video, thanks 👍
This was a really cool video. In the 80s here in Ireland my Mom was a teacher so she had heard the BBC computers were the one to buy. My first computer was a BBC Master 128k with floppy drive and RGB monitor (Phillips CM8833 I think was the model). From about the age of 10 I learned to program with BBC Basic and used to love making my own games. Friends had Spectrums and Amstrad systems but I found the BBC easier to program. You pointed out things like DEFPROC in BBC Basic and so on here and that brought back so many memories. The only thing I used to find back then was the lack of games in the game stores here in the 80s for my BBC. I found when I bought a tape deck and hooked that up I had access to way more games. I had often heard about the Electron but never knew a whole lot about it before this video. I hope someday to buy another BBC Master again as sadly I don't have the one from my childhood. Because of Acorn though I can say I'm 25 years now working in IT and as a System Admin and wouldn't have gotten there without the BBC ))
I find that most my IT colleagues had a BBC or Electron when they where kids, well at least ones over a certain age. I hope you manage to find a Master again, as that was a great machine to have for your first computer.
My very first home computer! An Electron, then an Archimedes, and then PCs.
Also I completely agree about how excellent the BBC Basic with an underlying OS was.
I had one of these back in 1984 for a week. It was so slow for the software I needed to use that I returned it and replaced with a CPC464, which cost more and I had to rewrite my programs, but was faster with better graphics and more memory. A missed opportunity for Acorn is so many ways. BBC Micro compatibility was the Electron's best selling point and the technical compromises destroyed that.
I live in the states and never heard of the Acorn machines back in the day. Looks like a great compact machine.
As a filthy American, I sort of love all these weird computers, but the best I had in equivalent was an original Gameboy with no color (I was born in 97) but I loved that sort of feeling of quirky cheap tech, and chicken run was pretty fun as I remember. I wish I was able to get some of these micros, but I have elevendy computers, and cars, and guns, so until I move, I guess that's gonna have to wait until they become priceless, and I proceed to kick myself.
You might reconsider calling the Electron "weird". Whilst there were undoubtedly some weird computers back in the 80s, the Electron wasn't one of them. It may have had shortcomings, but it still had a notably highly intelligent design (being so close to the BBC Micro, which was pretty much the best quality computer design in the 1980s). Anyway, if you use a smartphone today, or a modern Apple Mac, or ANY device with an ARM-based processor in it, remember that it was the same people behind the Electron, the BBC Micro, BBC BASIC and so on who made all that possible by designing the ARM chip in the first place.
My first computer, well back then was my families first computer and introduced me to my love of computers. I did later replace it with a Commodore 64 due to the range of games, however the Electron was definitely an underrated computer.
I had an electron and then later I had a BBC B, the electron was nice little machine which always thought of as a progression of the Acorn Atom rather than a scaled down BeeB. It did feel like a huge upgrade to get the BeeB. I later worked repairing BBC computers and went on training courses at Acorn in Cambridge which was amazing as we got to meet the people behind it.
Lovely video, I absolutely love my Elk too. I had a Beeb and Beeb Master growing up and never saw one back in the day. I've only just got mine working (built my own ULA and everything to get it running!) and it really impressed me with how complete it's Operating system, BASIC is and keyboard is, totally agree that it feel like a proper productive computer compared to the other home micros. I could certainly imagine doing serious things with it, back in the day, as you could with the Beeb. Colour clash aside I still don't think it can game as hard as the Spectrums best, but it does have a cracking Library of its own: Danger UXB, Galaga and Cyclone attack some of my personal faves. Ta!
Building a ULA replacment is no easy task.
@@RetroBytesUK tell me about it, only taken me a couple of years to get it running 😂
@@mogwaay Honestly a few years to get that up and working seams like great progress.
In my circle of friends and classmates, the Commodore 64 ruled with the spectrum in second place. One poor neighbor had an electron. He was on an island. Not much information about it, no software in the shops, no pirated games to exchange with his friends.
The Slogger Turbo has 8 K of SRAM in it - that would cost more than the four 8K DRAM chips put together. Eight 8K DRAM chips would have been nice, but the timing would be unlikely.
(Small point of pedantry: BBC BASIC does not have the LINE command - you need MOVE and DRAW (or PLOT or VDU)).
I fully support your comment about the keyboards. That Sinclair keyboard really did suck - it sucked the nastiest thing you can imagine sucking.
As I remember it, the Electron was perceived as a “cut down“ BBC Micro. This is an era when most of the ‘cheap’ versions of micros were seen to be false economy. (The Commodore 16 was an example of this.) At the time, the people I discussed computers with dismissed the Electron because it was seen as a poor man’s BBC. Sadly, that meant the woeful 48K Spectrum was somehow seen as more desirable!
11:45 Monochrome Composite output. ZX Spectrum did not have one of those as a socket.
I think the decision on stock ports was a bid odd - they were building a cost-reduced home computer for the UK market. 99% of people would be using the RF output and they could have got away with just that. Instead on a system where space and money for ports was at a premium they included all 3 of the display outputs from the BBC Micro. Yet they *didn't* include a joystick port as standard on a system which would be predominantly used for games (something I think already acknowledged by then to be a mistake on the Spectrum). They probably didn't even have to go as far as providing the full analogue interface from the BBC which really only ended up being a joystick port by accident anyway (so they could still have done this on the Plus 1 for people who needed the analogue port for other purposes). Putting a simple Atari-style interface on the electron as standard would have more useful than an RGB output.
Your right the BBCs joystick arrangment was vastly over the top for what you needed, there is an ADC driving it. I supect they figured if the spectrum managed with requiring an addon for joystrick suport they would be OK too. I did have a joystick for mine (as I had the plus1), but oddly for most games on the electron I preferred the keyboard. Probably due to the analogue nature of the joystick feeling a bit wooly for alot of games.
@@RetroBytesUK I do wonder if maybe one red line drawn was that whilst the Electron could be cut down from the BBC, it absolutely could not have a feature which the BBC didn't have? I can't think of any other credible reason why having a simple microswitch digital joystick continuing to be shoehorned into running off the analogue port rather than just using an Atari interface would continue to be the solution on a machine marketed at people who would predominantly use it to play games.
@@chriswathen9612 I wonder if software compatibility with the BBC is why they went that way for the plus1. Save having to write different joystick routines for the electron and BBC verisons of games.
I went from ZX81 to Oric-1 to Electron (and later BBC B). The Elk was a massive upgrade from the earlier machines (even though I never had any of the addons), and I *really* appreciated that proper keyboard. BBC Basic was the best, and remained so into the Archimedes era where it could be used to write full-on performant GUI apps.
Thanks to Richard Russell (who did the orginal z80 verison of BBC basic) we now have versions for Linux, Windows, OS X, and modern browsers. All the risc os stuff for gui will works, so anything written then is basic for the archinedes can now just run on any of those platforms. He also added opengl support, so you can do modern 3d stuff in it.
@@RetroBytesUK The RISC OS GUI stuff won't work on Richard's BBC BASIC versions (nor Matrix Brandy) since they use RISC OS operating system calls that aren't implemented on any other platform. But, straight single-tasking full-BASIC programs will. (Oh, and programs with inline assembly won't work either.) But yes, thanks to him and another developer we have TWO BBC BASIC implementations for modern hardware.
.... and I'm daft enough to have written a new piece of educational software that will run on any 32K BBC or Electron (with disc interface) and anything newer than that which has BBC graphics support (sorry, Sinclair Z88 users)...
That was a brilliant video, didn't know about the Acorn Electron so, thx for enhancing my knowledge of British home-computers.
But what made me wonder, talking from a German perspective, that you didn't mention the Amstrad CPC line at all, especially as another low-cost British home-computer at its time that took a lot of its design hints from the BBC Micro and the Locomotive Basic was pretty good, much better then C64 ones. Was easy extensible and it had a real OS/Firmware not depending on BASIC for its I/O like the C64 did.
Case in point that the CPC was my first computer I had as a teen and was compared to Sinclair or Acorn pretty successful on the European market, only beaten by the C64.
The only reason I did not mention the CPC with regards to the electron, is that the electron came out a year or two before the first model of the CPC. Thus the CPC did not figure in Acorns thinking.
I was lucky enough to get a BBC Model B but I remember how it was a joint Christmas present between my parents and grandparents, so that says something about how much that computer cost back in the 80's. I can only remember one person at school with an Acorn Electron, I think most had C64s or Spectrums, but I do remember someone having a Dragon computer.
Let's not forget an earlier Acorn machine, the Atom. This also had a built in Assembler and BASIC. It was my first home computer and at the time was very impressive and one of the only computers to have a proper keyboard! I remember adding a colour board and BBC BASIC to it at a later stage.
The assembly in BASIC is impressive. I'd done inline assembly in Pascal before but never in something like BASIC.
Unsuccessful? It helped me on the way to 30+ years in IT as a software engineer so I think not. I loved the thing. Great vid.
WOW - excellent and thorough video! Really enjoyed it.
I spent many many hours playing Repton & Repton 2 on this wonderful machine!
The Electron was/is a fantastic little machine! I spent literally hours and hours programming on mine, in both Basic and assembly language. I also played games too, of course! My favourites were Repton, Thrust, Chuckie Egg, and Gisburne's Castle. I sold it not too long ago as the ULA had died making it completely unusable, and then bought a BBC Model B from eBay. I lusted after one back in the 80s but could only ever afford the Electron instead. Nevertheless, I will always remember the Electron with much affection.
I worked at a school in London and the management at Acorn were surprisingly approachable when you spoke about education, but start talking home/game computer and it was obvious they had no interest.
As someone who programs firmware I can sympathies sometimes I can't fit an in-circuit debugger so I will use a status LED or something similar to see if my code work to that point
When John was telling us about getting the Electrons MOS running at an ABug he very much had our sympathies. All the time preasure and zero tooling
Great video - a really comprehensive summary of what the Acorn Electron could - and couldn't - and, er, could again - do! 👏🏻🖥️
A 4 bit memory is half as fast as an 8 bit memory if you use the same timing for both. But using the page mode in DRAMs you can make a 4MHz memory look like a 8MHz one in special cases (which is how the ARM2 had an average of 6MHz memory access speed) so the slowdown in getting the two halves of a byte for the processor or blocks of data for the video was not as bad as it would first seem.
The ULA does effectively use a form of page mode in the sense that it preserves the row address and issues consecutive column addresses for the two 4-bit transfers involved in transferring a byte. It seems like a great way of getting higher bandwidth from the RAM, and the ULA is indeed fully able to transfer 8 bits in a 2MHz cycle. So, that makes the high-bandwidth screen modes possible with only four RAM chips.
However, this timing regime and the need for the ULA to perform the transfers on the CPU's behalf means that complete transfers between the CPU and RAM are not possible within a single 2MHz cycle: the ULA cannot deliver the entire byte within the CPU's timing schedule. So, by adopting this technique, which seems like a great hack, the designers condemned the CPU to always access the built-in RAM at one byte per 1MHz cycle.
Although the CPU can access upper memory at 2MHz, and this will provide some performance benefits, it will spend a lot of its time running at 1MHz, which means that the benefits of having a 2MHz CPU are somewhat reduced. It just shows that some optimisations and supposed efficiencies can end up having the opposite effect and compromising the end result. And it may have increased the ULA's complexity as well.
I remember reading numerous articles in the monthly Electron programming magazines about trying to implement solutions in software to emulate some of the missing graphics features that were in the BBC, like mode 7 & sidewards scrolling. To this day I still think this was a mistake by Acorn to not have these features, as was the reduction of sound to 1 channel. However, BBC Basic and the built in assembler were absolutely the best out there for 8 bit home machine, and probably were responsible for creating an entire generation of professional programmers.
I would agree. When your target market is more likely to play games than do anything else, why would you accept an implementation that had missing graphics features and inferior sound? Having the same graphics & sound as the BBC Micro should have been top of the list of things that could not be cut out.
@@chriswathen9612 I think the targeting of games is a big part of why acorn decided to drop mode7. As very few games on the BBC used mode 7, as it does not really do graphics in that mode but graphic characters. It was a mode that was mostly used by applications, and educational software.
I think the big issue with it is that they discontinued it too early. Commodore, Amstrad and Sinclair kept theirs going and rode the wave with the 8-bit resurgence of '87/'88 when the game consoles(Atari 2600 not withstanding) hadn't entered Europe yet and parents were looking for a gaming system for their kids that cost less than an Amiga.
That's how I ended up with a C64. Me dad asked me what looked better of the 3 systems available at a price he could afford and the Spectrum and Amstrad didn't impress, the hardware sprites and sound really won it for 5 year old me.
I think if the Electron, it may have had Amstrad's place in that.
They really missed out on that window where amstrad and other squeesed a bit more life out of the 8bit systems when it comes to the electron. They did produce the Master during that period to keep education sales flowing. I think they where stretched fairly thin doing the master and ARM.
@@RetroBytesUK I remember that period quite well, swapping tapes on the yard like they were football stickers, then making copies on our dad's hi-fis when we got home.
We had it organised(well, for primary schoolers) by the end. We'd meet in town and pool our money together on a Saturday morning, one of us going to Dixons to get a pack of tapes and the rest of us going to Boots and picking the best games(usually bad arcade ports and licenced games by US Gold or Ocean) from the £1.99 rack that none of us owned. Then we'd spend the afternoon doing high speed dubbing on someone's dad's fancy £1k Sony hi-fi(had to use normal speed on the lower end players, took hours) and the evening playing.
It's only worth keeping old models in production if they have a decent library of software available. Also older designs aren't always cheaper to manufacture. Part of the reason the C128 was discontinued was that the legacy components made it cost as much as an Amiga to produce.
BBC BASIC was the best version. PROC was so much more sophisicated than using just GOTO, and routines like RENUM to properly list your BASIC code in evenly spaced numbers, show me another BASIC that did that..? And those shortcuts on the Electron keys, not even the BBC had those to save on typing. Something in common with those Spectrum users after all...
I was not so long ago that I realised other basics did not have renum. It seam loke such a vital thing to missout.
It was also a lot faster than other BASICs, I believe, especially with the integer variables.
Excellent video. Nothing controversial at all (I agree with all your points 🙂)
I had an Electron, with a Plus 1 and the PRES AP3/4 disc interface that you referred to. Also had View, Viewsheet and Click ROMs and, for a time, the Slogger Plus 2, which was a circuit board to sit between the Electron and Plus 1 and gave it another two cartridge ports. It was designed to go into Slogger's RX case which I didn't have, so the whole thing was a bit of a wobbly mess with it installed.
Eventually upgraded to a BBC Master, which was like the Electron with no compromises and everything included.
I really like the Master too. I eventually could not resist buying a master and I picked one up in 2004 for £15. I then kept finding lots of Acorn stuff for sale going for at what felt like very little money, but those selling it just thought of it as junk and where happy to just get rid of it and get a few quid in return.
Love the Acorn and ARM content. Excellent work. I has been edutained.
I think MSX BASIC was probably the only real competitor to BBC BASIC in terms of functionality tbh.
Always happy to watch your videos :)