The Acorn Electron is a budget version of the BBC Micro educational/home computer made by Acorn Computers Ltd. It has 32 kilobytes of RAM, and its ROM includes BBC BASIC v2 along with its operating system. The Electron was able to save and load programs onto audio cassette via a supplied converter cable that connected it to any standard tape recorder that had the correct sockets. It was capable of basic graphics, and could display onto either a television set, a colour monitor or a "green screen" monitor. At its peak, the Electron was the third best selling micro in the United Kingdom, and total lifetime game sales for the Electron exceeded those of the BBC Micro. The hardware of the BBC Micro was emulated by a single customized ULA chip designed by Acorn in conjunction with Ferranti. It had feature limitations such as the inability to provide teletext mode and being unable to output more than one channel of sound. By contrast, the BBC Micro was capable of three-way polyphony. The edge-connector on the rear of the Electron exposed almost all the Bus lines, but not all. For Issue 1-4 motherboards, the ULA had an issue similar to those experienced by other socketed CPU's. Over time, the thermal heating and cooling could cause the ULA to rise slightly out of its socket just enough to cause the machine to start exhibiting 'hanging' or other startup-failure issues, such as a continuous 'startup beep'. This was despite a metal cover, and locking-bar mechanism designed to prevent this from occurring. Pushing down on the metal cover to reseat the ULA was normally sufficient to rectify these issues. Issue 5 and 6 boards utilized a different epoxy resin covering directly over the ULA, which resolved this issue. Wikipedia [ - ]

The Acorn Electron is a budget version of the BBC Micro educational/home computer made by Acorn... [ + ]