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.
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. 😂
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Does anyone else find it odd that pictures of Chris Curry look nothing at all like Martin Freeman? A lot of microcontroller hobbyists are still using "caps lock debugging" to this very day... that's why Arduinos come with an LED presoldered to one of the GPIO pins. How could anybody possibly argue that any other BASIC could possibly compare to BBC BASIC? I wish I had an assembler like that for the instruction sets I use these days. ENDPROC!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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)).
32:26 Weirdly the C64 was one of the computers that had a distinct operating system in the form of the kernel rom. Virtually nothing seems to have made use of it but in theory it should have been possible to write software that ran directly on the Commodore Pet, Vic20 and C64 and used the kernel as a common software interface like MSDos can. You would be limited to text only software but nobody seems to have been doing it! You are more talking about the disk filing system than an operating system.
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!
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.
"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.
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!
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!
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
37:32 Fear not because you will be lucky to know another person with a BBC micro let alone a disk drive for it! :) This was one of the massive advantages of the electron. Because you hadn't spent £400 on a computer with a bunch of pointless ports you will never ever use, it seemed like buying the disk drive wasn't quite as bad a proposition, although it was still way too expensive. Everybody loves to slag off tape but here's the uncomfortable truth. Tape was what let everything happen on those home computers. There were budget games you could buy for only £1.99! How much would a cheap disk for the Atari ST cost? Tape was everything and let everyone do so much you won't believe. Everyone has been lied to about tape. More than anything it was what let everything happen. Nobody could afford that disc drive they wanted but how many people had access to some kind of tape player or could get one from somewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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!
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.
45:00 I would choose the Acorn Electron over the BBC micro. Firstly it looks nicer! Not an important reason but the BBC micro was a horrible looking thing. Secondly and more importantly it's much more portable and takes up less space on your desk. Both very good reasons. You could go places with your electron. You also don't need all those extra ports the BBC micro has. Do you really need a second processor? What for? If you did could you afford one? What's the point then. It's also the baseline computer in the series, the common platform for the BBC type computers. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, it just feels a lot more fun than a BBC micro ever did. I'd rather have the fun computer that the serious one.
All very good points, I'd not given the deskspace much thought. You may also want to look at the master compact for space reasons as well, its also a good looking case. Your right back then most people could not afford a 2nd cpu, now thanks to pi tube direct it can be done very cheaply. I've had fun playing with it, using it for running CP/M and being an early IBM compatible ish PC, and also running tube elite. Panos was interesting to look at, but I can see why it did not catch on. The one I use the most is the ARM cpu, so I can run basic utils very quickly and with lots of RAM. I know not everyone wants todo that sort of thing, or is interested in it. I like your way of looking at it.
The Electron was the better HOME computer. BBC was over spec'd - great for education and industry. Back in the early/mid 80s TV, cassette and maybe joystick was all the average home user wanted. Back then even a printer was a rarity, wouldn't have been until the 1990s that they became more common.
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 was a new user back in those days and unable to get the acorn i ended up with a spectrum because it had a HUGE memory and we couldn't afford a BBC or commodore 64 it was brilliant but having to work six seven days a week doing a paper round for three years to pay for it wasn't so nice
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.
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.
How dare you blaspheme against that language most sublime that is LISP?! You must do a video on the Lisp Machines to atone for this Sin. Preferably Genera and their custom made Ivory chips for Lisp - always wondered how exactly those were designed.
I have mentioned Symbolics lisp machine a few times. Symbolics had a rather significant impact on GPL becoming a thing. I'd tried and failed to get Genera lisp running on my tru64 box a while ago, I must go back to that at some point.
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 often saw these advertised and wanted to buy one; I did have a VIC20 and a Sharp pocket computer a bit later and have to say that the VIC20 and it's BASIC was a bit crap and have to agree that the best 8-bit BASIC is BBC. I didn't know about the inline assembler - that is a nice feature. When I converted a BASIC subroutine I had to write out the assembly language, hand assemble it into hex, put it in an array and write it into RAM when the BASIC started - it worked just fine and sped things up enormously, but it would have much easier to just have the assembly in the BASIC program. I didn't know 8 bit home machines an OS; I thought they just booted into a BASIC interpreter so that's a nice feature too. I really should have got the Electron instead of the VIC20.
Acorns machines seam to be fairly rare in booting up an OS, rather than only a basic interpreter. Other than the PC I'm struggling to think of another mainstream machine in the UK that did in the early 80s.
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
@@sparthir Yes it was. But speaking as somebody who still owns their Spectrum from 82 that is a low bar!!!! I was surprised to hear they were third best seller on release as I don't think I came across one back in the day. Education and industry needed the BBC. It is a public project that was one of the best investment ever.
Given everything the computer literacy project kicked off, its probably one of the most effective bits of public spending to boost the econony in the last 50 years.
HEHE. BT Merlin! Takes me back! We had one in DWP or Benefits Agency back in the day. We used it for printing out address labels in relation to the new DLA benefit back in 1992! LOL! The amber screen was cool!
Without the Electron, Acorn would never have designed and improved their chip design tools and skills to the level they did. And without these, they would never even have remotely considered making their own CPU. To say No Electron, No ARM, might seem a bit of a jump, given all the work they did on ULAs and other devices, but it was certainly one of the major stepping stones. It also gave them massive motivation to generate more value for the company when they needed external investment in order to keep going.
Agreed. I think the design efforts involved with the Electron are overlooked in the popular narratives about Acorn, but there will have been a lot of hard experience gained from the exercise. Another thing is that the Electron introduced 64-kilobit dynamic RAM devices to Acorn's microcomputer line-up for the first time. Acorn needed to move off 16-kilobit DRAMs in its BBC Micro range, doing so with the Acorn Business Computer range (and consequently the Model B+). All of this continuous improvement was necessary to be able to keep making competitive new products.
I wanted a BBC micro, but we wern't middle-class, so I had to settle for an Electron... and a lump of coal. Lack of Mode 7 was the only bad thing I found, so I got a Oric after that, which had a sort-of-Mode7
Yeah, something like that. Or you can compare it to a gate array. In the UK they made ULSs, while in the US they made gate arrays. fpgas are quite more advanced than the ULAs in addition to being reprogrammable.
Sort of, but no. Firstly they weren’t in any way programmable. The mask layer was part of chip manufacturing. Secondly they didn’t have the range of resources that an FPGA has. The FPGA isn’t just logic gates (LUTs), but is also flip flops, memory (BRAM blocks, typically 2K in size), DSP hardware (fast multiply and accumulate blocks), clock generators (PLL units to generate arbitrary clock frequencies from a given input) with the circuitry to fan these clocks out to all parts of the chip and custom IO hardware (for things like differential pair pins, fast serial connections etc). The evolution was ULA => PLA => GAL => CPLD => FPGA, so it’s a very early ancestor.
It did - but it was called DRAW() etc Or was it called PLOT?? - I really can't remember now, but I remember that it was a sub-feature of another command
@@MarkFraserWeather VDU25 aka PLOT did every graphics operation (except printing text at the graphics cursor). Lines, triangles, circles, ellipses, arcs, sectors etc.
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 RUclipsrs 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...
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.
Lisp is truly dire as an interactive line by line typing experience, but as a programming language it is about fifty billion times more powerful and useful than BASIC.
Atari 400 had the absolute worst keyboard ever made. At least the Spectrum was compact, Atari had all the space they could wish for - they just wanted their 'inexpensive' computer to have a keyboard that *suuuuucked* to upsell people to the Atari 800. They knew you needed it, and they didn't spare one second of you using their computer to remind you that you bought the cheaper model.
I started with an Atari 400 (bought pre-upgraded to 48K) and later got an 800. While the 400's keyboard wasn't great, it was *way* better than the ZX80 and ZX81 - and just like the Sinclair machines, it was possible to get replacement keyboards with proper keys. I actually got one of those keyboards a year or so before I got my 800.
@@dunebasher1971 I was just a kid at the time, and got the 400 one Christmas - I never knew there were keyboard replacements! But after a weeks of my dad trying to type in the magazine programs and having too many typos and it taking forever, he litterally threw it off the desk and came back a few hours later with a new 800.
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!
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.
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!
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.
Had one of these and was so pissed at no mode 7. Sold it and put extra to a master 128 when it was released. Cost me attending 6th form to do my A’s to do it with bank of Mum helping lol😂
Not having mode 7 was a real pain, I managed to pick up a master compact in my final year of GCSEs thank goodness as we did a module on viewdata (using communitel). Viewdata did feel very dated at the time though, as the internet was starting to become a thing people where becoming aware of and the web had existed for a year or two, and I'd used gopher a few times as well.
@@RetroBytesUK Viewdata is still going in a few corners - the CCL4 BBS is online, as is a Prestel-like service TELSTAR. And there's even a teletext-over-IP service! Clients are included with both Richard Russell's BBC BASIC distributions and Matrix Brandy BASIC VI.
I disagreed with your assessment. The spectrum was the best of its kind, the Atari 800xl was the best of it's kind (at the time). When the Electron was released it was a poor version of the BBC. This is what makes it a bad system IMO. People can be forgiving when a company provides a solution which is outclassed by a competitor, if its their 'best offer' but when a company which already has a superior system makes a 'cost reduced' version, it is always a step backwards. That said, for the people who owned and loved their Electrons, it was a great system I'm certain. Maybe also it allowed people who just longed to own a BBC but couldn't afford it to have a BBC like system (though honestly would have been better for them to save up for a BBC). I think the Electron is rather like the re-release of the Atari XL series as an XE series. It was an effort to 'cash in' by the creators and faired about as well as such efforts should (though I guess a business person would say 'remain competive').
It was far less of an attempt to "cash in" that it was a strategic necessity. At the time, Clive Sinclair was livid about Acorn having been chosen by the BBC and wouldn't shut up about how many Spectrums he was selling and that it was his version of BASIC that was becoming the standard. Acorn needed to undermine that argument by delivering something that ran their version of BASIC in the home. People will brush away suggestions about home users writing BASIC programs and doing serious stuff, but you can read comments from people who had Electrons to develop software that they could then run on the Beeb, either for educational or professional purposes. The remarkable thing about the Electron, and the selling point which got obscured by the relentless popular focus on gaming, is that it provides a high level of compatibility with the software system employed by the BBC Micro. That means you can run many Beeb applications and languages on the Electron, with any dedicated Electron versions only differing in terms of things like keyboard shortcuts. You could even go the other way and use various Electron cartridges in the BBC Master 128. The software frameworks were very similar and highly compatible, as the video points out, and this was by design. That is how people were able to expand the Electron to provide many of the same capabilities as the Beeb. But you could have the essence of the Beeb at half the price. That is pretty different from what Atari were doing. The XE series was most likely a way of warming over their aging 8-bit line up to provide revenue in lieu of the ST eventually taking off. The Commodore 64 shored up Commodore's revenues in a similar fashion. Such things may have been cynical, but they were commercially necessary, too.
@@paul_boddie a good write up. Thanks, and aprechiate the indepth detail / history :). Though I think we will have to disagree on "commercial necessity". IMO the fault of modern business is it's not about providing the best product priced as affordably as the quality allows, but about dominating the market and taking a controlling share of all profits. Unfortunately this has been considered "good business" my entire lifespan. That said, it is capitalism, and for all its flaws its the best we have short of a StarTrek style universe (which remains firmly fictional).
@@goddessesstartrekonlinefle3061 Well, for Atari and Commodore it was arguably about survival: "commercial necessity" is just me phrasing it nicely. Sadly, the customer doesn't necessarily benefit from the products introduced to generate revenue in those situations. As you undoubtedly know, the fortunes of Atari and Commodore were closely bound together, and both found themselves having to make a fairly abrupt transition to next-generation products and having nothing particularly substantial to fill the gap. So, the customer got the XE machines and the C128, and so on. There are people who would probably argue that Acorn should never have done the Electron - probably people who owned a Beeb who felt that the Electron ruined the party - but Acorn was under strategic pressure from below (Sinclair) and above (various business computing platforms). As this video points out, Acorn spent a lot of money trying to move into new markets (the US, doing so in a fairly ill-advised fashion) and upmarket (the Acorn Business Computer). In that context, the Electron at least sold in six-figure quantities and was not actually a bad idea. And, as shown by the BT Merlin product, the Electron was also meant to be the core of various business products. Chris Curry envisaged more advanced products based around it as a lower-cost, easier to customise, core of the kind of solutions we saw with the ABC and BBC Micro second processors, but it seems that his priorities were marginalised when the company decided to abandon the Electron.
While I was never an Electron fan, I do have to take issue with the suggestion that having proper graphics commands built into BASIC was unusual for the time. It really wasn't; only Commodore BASIC lacked graphics commands, because Commodore felt it important to maintain BASIC compatibility back to the PET, a machine that by hardware design did not have any graphics modes.
46:43 The Electron has no sound chip. :( This was something they ditched and they let the ULA handle sound. Sadly the sound is much more constrained than on the spectrum due to the way it was implemented. The spectrum often had quite nice sound due to the use of samples and multi channel interrupt driven music. This kind of thing was harder on the Electron because of the way sound is wired into the ULA although should be possible as the game Exile uses some tricks to get sampled speech apparently. The terrible sound on the spectrum is just one of those silly memes. Here is some music on the spectrum: ruclips.net/video/IMZr4H5bWRQ/видео.html It just has a different way of sounding. Computer sound chips were something that was way over rated. The fact the electron manages so well without one at all tells you all you need to know really.
@@finnw1 What I linked to is genuinely a 48K spectrum game and the 48K spectrum COULD do it because there wasn't a sound chip, so interrupts were used to play music by driving the speaker on & off to make sound. Like a really lo-fi sampler. The AY chip stuff tends to sound different again but the 48K spectrum wasn't just limited to beeps the way people like to make out.
@@SolarLantern424 People are doing more impressive music on the Electron these days by driving the ULA's sound generator in more interesting ways, perhaps incorporating some of the tricks used in achieving the Exile speech effect. I imagine that most programmers couldn't be bothered with the sound back in the day, whereas people seem to take it as more of a challenge now, and they also have a wider range of techniques to play with.
I've never quite understood why, if Acorn felt that the Electron needed to be more games-friendly, they deliberately left out important things like hardware scrolling and thought that dropping down to a single sound channel was the way forward - they were actually building a machine that was significantly *less* games-friendly than the BBC Micro. And really, they should have taken the opportunity to implement hardware sprites. True, the BBC Micro didn't have them either (one of the most notable omissions from an otherwise extremely capable machine), but since it was *already* difficult to port BBC Micro games across to the Electron due to the latter's limitations, they might as well have thought "Sod it, let's give the Elk an advantage the Beeb and Spectrum don't have".
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.
Agreed that the best implementation of BASIC was the BBC version. Second best I'd say was Locomotive BASIC as used on the Amstrad CPC series (my first computer was a CPC 464, but I later own a BBC B). Locomotive BASIC was influenced by BBC BASIC iirc.
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!
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.
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. 😂
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Does anyone else find it odd that pictures of Chris Curry look nothing at all like Martin Freeman?
A lot of microcontroller hobbyists are still using "caps lock debugging" to this very day... that's why Arduinos come with an LED presoldered to one of the GPIO pins.
How could anybody possibly argue that any other BASIC could possibly compare to BBC BASIC? I wish I had an assembler like that for the instruction sets I use these days. ENDPROC!
No I do get that feeling some times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)).
32:26 Weirdly the C64 was one of the computers that had a distinct operating system in the form of the kernel rom. Virtually nothing seems to have made use of it but in theory it should have been possible to write software that ran directly on the Commodore Pet, Vic20 and C64 and used the kernel as a common software interface like MSDos can. You would be limited to text only software but nobody seems to have been doing it!
You are more talking about the disk filing system than an operating system.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
"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.
£399 for bbc b in 1982 is like spending £1800 today. Electron offered much more affordable computing with a half decent keyboard.
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 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.
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.
I think MSX BASIC was probably the only real competitor to BBC BASIC in terms of functionality tbh.
11:45 Monochrome Composite output. ZX Spectrum did not have one of those as a socket.
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!
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...
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 lost it at your “big but’s” comment.
Loving your content 😎👍
This would be interesting if I could hear you over the background music.
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.
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.
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.
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.
37:32 Fear not because you will be lucky to know another person with a BBC micro let alone a disk drive for it! :) This was one of the massive advantages of the electron. Because you hadn't spent £400 on a computer with a bunch of pointless ports you will never ever use, it seemed like buying the disk drive wasn't quite as bad a proposition, although it was still way too expensive. Everybody loves to slag off tape but here's the uncomfortable truth. Tape was what let everything happen on those home computers. There were budget games you could buy for only £1.99! How much would a cheap disk for the Atari ST cost? Tape was everything and let everyone do so much you won't believe. Everyone has been lied to about tape. More than anything it was what let everything happen.
Nobody could afford that disc drive they wanted but how many people had access to some kind of tape player or could get one from somewhere.
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.
Every time you said "on the spectrum", my mind went elsewhere. I suppose back in the day they didn't use that expression.
Oh I see what you mean.
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.
I agree with BBC basic being so good, and the Amstrad CPC basic coming second.
I've never really had a chance to write any code in amsrads basic, but from what I've seen they did a rather nice job.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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! 🤗
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).
Why the background music? Would someone upload a Jazz album with computer tech talk in the background ?..
Man those old school sockets are great looking lol
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 fully support your comment about the keyboards. That Sinclair keyboard really did suck - it sucked the nastiest thing you can imagine sucking.
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.
45:00 I would choose the Acorn Electron over the BBC micro. Firstly it looks nicer! Not an important reason but the BBC micro was a horrible looking thing. Secondly and more importantly it's much more portable and takes up less space on your desk. Both very good reasons. You could go places with your electron.
You also don't need all those extra ports the BBC micro has. Do you really need a second processor? What for? If you did could you afford one? What's the point then.
It's also the baseline computer in the series, the common platform for the BBC type computers.
Lastly and perhaps most importantly, it just feels a lot more fun than a BBC micro ever did.
I'd rather have the fun computer that the serious one.
All very good points, I'd not given the deskspace much thought. You may also want to look at the master compact for space reasons as well, its also a good looking case. Your right back then most people could not afford a 2nd cpu, now thanks to pi tube direct it can be done very cheaply. I've had fun playing with it, using it for running CP/M and being an early IBM compatible ish PC, and also running tube elite. Panos was interesting to look at, but I can see why it did not catch on. The one I use the most is the ARM cpu, so I can run basic utils very quickly and with lots of RAM. I know not everyone wants todo that sort of thing, or is interested in it. I like your way of looking at it.
The Electron was the better HOME computer. BBC was over spec'd - great for education and industry. Back in the early/mid 80s TV, cassette and maybe joystick was all the average home user wanted. Back then even a printer was a rarity, wouldn't have been until the 1990s that they became more common.
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 was a new user back in those days and unable to get the acorn i ended up with a spectrum because it had a HUGE memory and we couldn't afford a BBC or commodore 64 it was brilliant but having to work six seven days a week doing a paper round for three years to pay for it wasn't so nice
Ha ha Buts and you cannot lie, nice one, see what you did there! 😂
What a fantastic (and complete!!) introduction to the Electron and its history. Very informative and delivered in an engaging way!
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....
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.
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.
How dare you blaspheme against that language most sublime that is LISP?!
You must do a video on the Lisp Machines to atone for this Sin.
Preferably Genera and their custom made Ivory chips for Lisp - always wondered how exactly those were designed.
I have mentioned Symbolics lisp machine a few times. Symbolics had a rather significant impact on GPL becoming a thing. I'd tried and failed to get Genera lisp running on my tru64 box a while ago, I must go back to that at some point.
The Aquarious keyboard was truly atrocious - dreadful, dreadful, dreadful.
Amazing to think that the 80's version of "here" debugging was an essential tool!
"We go dowmarket?!" - H. Hauser, 1982
How about a video regarding the precursor of the Beeb, the Acorn Atom 😄
I've recently just bought one, I've yet to pick it up. I have started building an econet interface for it.
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 often saw these advertised and wanted to buy one; I did have a VIC20 and a Sharp pocket computer a bit later and have to say that the VIC20 and it's BASIC was a bit crap and have to agree that the best 8-bit BASIC is BBC. I didn't know about the inline assembler - that is a nice feature. When I converted a BASIC subroutine I had to write out the assembly language, hand assemble it into hex, put it in an array and write it into RAM when the BASIC started - it worked just fine and sped things up enormously, but it would have much easier to just have the assembly in the BASIC program. I didn't know 8 bit home machines an OS; I thought they just booted into a BASIC interpreter so that's a nice feature too. I really should have got the Electron instead of the VIC20.
Acorns machines seam to be fairly rare in booting up an OS, rather than only a basic interpreter. Other than the PC I'm struggling to think of another mainstream machine in the UK that did in the early 80s.
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
The BBC was too capable. The Electron not, just, quite enough. It deserved better.
Compared to the Spectrum though it was much better. So it depends on the niche I suppose.
@@sparthir Yes it was. But speaking as somebody who still owns their Spectrum from 82 that is a low bar!!!! I was surprised to hear they were third best seller on release as I don't think I came across one back in the day. Education and industry needed the BBC. It is a public project that was one of the best investment ever.
Given everything the computer literacy project kicked off, its probably one of the most effective bits of public spending to boost the econony in the last 50 years.
@@RetroBytesUK Yes. It is a shame today's BBC isn't the same institution as it once was.
HEHE. BT Merlin! Takes me back! We had one in DWP or Benefits Agency back in the day. We used it for printing out address labels in relation to the new DLA benefit back in 1992! LOL! The amber screen was cool!
I had no idea DWP where using them. They really did make it into all sorts of places.
Without the Electron, Acorn would never have designed and improved their chip design tools and skills to the level they did. And without these, they would never even have remotely considered making their own CPU. To say No Electron, No ARM, might seem a bit of a jump, given all the work they did on ULAs and other devices, but it was certainly one of the major stepping stones. It also gave them massive motivation to generate more value for the company when they needed external investment in order to keep going.
Agreed. I think the design efforts involved with the Electron are overlooked in the popular narratives about Acorn, but there will have been a lot of hard experience gained from the exercise. Another thing is that the Electron introduced 64-kilobit dynamic RAM devices to Acorn's microcomputer line-up for the first time. Acorn needed to move off 16-kilobit DRAMs in its BBC Micro range, doing so with the Acorn Business Computer range (and consequently the Model B+). All of this continuous improvement was necessary to be able to keep making competitive new products.
Nice touch with the Django Reinhardt music!
"Comments with a lot of parenthesis in them"
(LOL) ()
I wanted a BBC micro, but we wern't middle-class, so I had to settle for an Electron... and a lump of coal.
Lack of Mode 7 was the only bad thing I found, so I got a Oric after that, which had a sort-of-Mode7
Same reason for having an electron as a kid too.
ULA much like an FPGA but fixed I guess?
Yeah, something like that. Or you can compare it to a gate array. In the UK they made ULSs, while in the US they made gate arrays. fpgas are quite more advanced than the ULAs in addition to being reprogrammable.
Sort of, but no. Firstly they weren’t in any way programmable. The mask layer was part of chip manufacturing. Secondly they didn’t have the range of resources that an FPGA has. The FPGA isn’t just logic gates (LUTs), but is also flip flops, memory (BRAM blocks, typically 2K in size), DSP hardware (fast multiply and accumulate blocks), clock generators (PLL units to generate arbitrary clock frequencies from a given input) with the circuitry to fan these clocks out to all parts of the chip and custom IO hardware (for things like differential pair pins, fast serial connections etc).
The evolution was ULA => PLA => GAL => CPLD => FPGA, so it’s a very early ancestor.
I'm pretty sure BBC BASIC II didn't have the LINE command to draw lines.
I think that came in on BASIC V on the Archimedes.
It did - but it was called DRAW() etc Or was it called PLOT?? - I really can't remember now, but I remember that it was a sub-feature of another command
@derektodd7941 it was part of VDU25, which also did circles and rectangles.
@@MarkFraserWeather VDU25 aka PLOT did every graphics operation (except printing text at the graphics cursor). Lines, triangles, circles, ellipses, arcs, sectors etc.
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 RUclipsrs 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...
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.
Very impressive documentary
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.
The most uncontroversial thing you said was about the god awful speccy keyboard!!! It's basically a TV remove turned into a keyboard.
Lisp is truly dire as an interactive line by line typing experience, but as a programming language it is about fifty billion times more powerful and useful than BASIC.
Atari 400 had the absolute worst keyboard ever made. At least the Spectrum was compact, Atari had all the space they could wish for - they just wanted their 'inexpensive' computer to have a keyboard that *suuuuucked* to upsell people to the Atari 800. They knew you needed it, and they didn't spare one second of you using their computer to remind you that you bought the cheaper model.
I started with an Atari 400 (bought pre-upgraded to 48K) and later got an 800. While the 400's keyboard wasn't great, it was *way* better than the ZX80 and ZX81 - and just like the Sinclair machines, it was possible to get replacement keyboards with proper keys. I actually got one of those keyboards a year or so before I got my 800.
@@dunebasher1971 I was just a kid at the time, and got the 400 one Christmas - I never knew there were keyboard replacements! But after a weeks of my dad trying to type in the magazine programs and having too many typos and it taking forever, he litterally threw it off the desk and came back a few hours later with a new 800.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
If it sold poorly, why are there always floods of second hand ones for sale at any one time!
The retailers discounted them heavily to get rid of them as they were nearly obsolete by the time they were delivered
Had one of these and was so pissed at no mode 7. Sold it and put extra to a master 128 when it was released. Cost me attending 6th form to do my A’s to do it with bank of Mum helping lol😂
Not having mode 7 was a real pain, I managed to pick up a master compact in my final year of GCSEs thank goodness as we did a module on viewdata (using communitel). Viewdata did feel very dated at the time though, as the internet was starting to become a thing people where becoming aware of and the web had existed for a year or two, and I'd used gopher a few times as well.
@@RetroBytesUK Viewdata is still going in a few corners - the CCL4 BBS is online, as is a Prestel-like service TELSTAR. And there's even a teletext-over-IP service! Clients are included with both Richard Russell's BBC BASIC distributions and Matrix Brandy BASIC VI.
I disagreed with your assessment. The spectrum was the best of its kind, the Atari 800xl was the best of it's kind (at the time). When the Electron was released it was a poor version of the BBC. This is what makes it a bad system IMO. People can be forgiving when a company provides a solution which is outclassed by a competitor, if its their 'best offer' but when a company which already has a superior system makes a 'cost reduced' version, it is always a step backwards.
That said, for the people who owned and loved their Electrons, it was a great system I'm certain. Maybe also it allowed people who just longed to own a BBC but couldn't afford it to have a BBC like system (though honestly would have been better for them to save up for a BBC).
I think the Electron is rather like the re-release of the Atari XL series as an XE series. It was an effort to 'cash in' by the creators and faired about as well as such efforts should (though I guess a business person would say 'remain competive').
It was far less of an attempt to "cash in" that it was a strategic necessity. At the time, Clive Sinclair was livid about Acorn having been chosen by the BBC and wouldn't shut up about how many Spectrums he was selling and that it was his version of BASIC that was becoming the standard. Acorn needed to undermine that argument by delivering something that ran their version of BASIC in the home.
People will brush away suggestions about home users writing BASIC programs and doing serious stuff, but you can read comments from people who had Electrons to develop software that they could then run on the Beeb, either for educational or professional purposes. The remarkable thing about the Electron, and the selling point which got obscured by the relentless popular focus on gaming, is that it provides a high level of compatibility with the software system employed by the BBC Micro.
That means you can run many Beeb applications and languages on the Electron, with any dedicated Electron versions only differing in terms of things like keyboard shortcuts. You could even go the other way and use various Electron cartridges in the BBC Master 128. The software frameworks were very similar and highly compatible, as the video points out, and this was by design. That is how people were able to expand the Electron to provide many of the same capabilities as the Beeb. But you could have the essence of the Beeb at half the price.
That is pretty different from what Atari were doing. The XE series was most likely a way of warming over their aging 8-bit line up to provide revenue in lieu of the ST eventually taking off. The Commodore 64 shored up Commodore's revenues in a similar fashion. Such things may have been cynical, but they were commercially necessary, too.
@@paul_boddie a good write up. Thanks, and aprechiate the indepth detail / history :).
Though I think we will have to disagree on "commercial necessity". IMO the fault of modern business is it's not about providing the best product priced as affordably as the quality allows, but about dominating the market and taking a controlling share of all profits. Unfortunately this has been considered "good business" my entire lifespan. That said, it is capitalism, and for all its flaws its the best we have short of a StarTrek style universe (which remains firmly fictional).
@@goddessesstartrekonlinefle3061 Well, for Atari and Commodore it was arguably about survival: "commercial necessity" is just me phrasing it nicely. Sadly, the customer doesn't necessarily benefit from the products introduced to generate revenue in those situations. As you undoubtedly know, the fortunes of Atari and Commodore were closely bound together, and both found themselves having to make a fairly abrupt transition to next-generation products and having nothing particularly substantial to fill the gap. So, the customer got the XE machines and the C128, and so on.
There are people who would probably argue that Acorn should never have done the Electron - probably people who owned a Beeb who felt that the Electron ruined the party - but Acorn was under strategic pressure from below (Sinclair) and above (various business computing platforms). As this video points out, Acorn spent a lot of money trying to move into new markets (the US, doing so in a fairly ill-advised fashion) and upmarket (the Acorn Business Computer). In that context, the Electron at least sold in six-figure quantities and was not actually a bad idea.
And, as shown by the BT Merlin product, the Electron was also meant to be the core of various business products. Chris Curry envisaged more advanced products based around it as a lower-cost, easier to customise, core of the kind of solutions we saw with the ABC and BBC Micro second processors, but it seems that his priorities were marginalised when the company decided to abandon the Electron.
While I was never an Electron fan, I do have to take issue with the suggestion that having proper graphics commands built into BASIC was unusual for the time. It really wasn't; only Commodore BASIC lacked graphics commands, because Commodore felt it important to maintain BASIC compatibility back to the PET, a machine that by hardware design did not have any graphics modes.
46:43 The Electron has no sound chip. :(
This was something they ditched and they let the ULA handle sound. Sadly the sound is much more constrained than on the spectrum due to the way it was implemented. The spectrum often had quite nice sound due to the use of samples and multi channel interrupt driven music. This kind of thing was harder on the Electron because of the way sound is wired into the ULA although should be possible as the game Exile uses some tricks to get sampled speech apparently.
The terrible sound on the spectrum is just one of those silly memes.
Here is some music on the spectrum: ruclips.net/video/IMZr4H5bWRQ/видео.html
It just has a different way of sounding.
Computer sound chips were something that was way over rated. The fact the electron manages so well without one at all tells you all you need to know really.
Only the 128k spectrum models (with an AY-3-8912 sound chip) could do that. 48k models really did have terrible sound.
@@finnw1 What I linked to is genuinely a 48K spectrum game and the 48K spectrum COULD do it because there wasn't a sound chip, so interrupts were used to play music by driving the speaker on & off to make sound. Like a really lo-fi sampler. The AY chip stuff tends to sound different again but the 48K spectrum wasn't just limited to beeps the way people like to make out.
@@SolarLantern424 People are doing more impressive music on the Electron these days by driving the ULA's sound generator in more interesting ways, perhaps incorporating some of the tricks used in achieving the Exile speech effect. I imagine that most programmers couldn't be bothered with the sound back in the day, whereas people seem to take it as more of a challenge now, and they also have a wider range of techniques to play with.
I've never quite understood why, if Acorn felt that the Electron needed to be more games-friendly, they deliberately left out important things like hardware scrolling and thought that dropping down to a single sound channel was the way forward - they were actually building a machine that was significantly *less* games-friendly than the BBC Micro. And really, they should have taken the opportunity to implement hardware sprites. True, the BBC Micro didn't have them either (one of the most notable omissions from an otherwise extremely capable machine), but since it was *already* difficult to port BBC Micro games across to the Electron due to the latter's limitations, they might as well have thought "Sod it, let's give the Elk an advantage the Beeb and Spectrum don't have".
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.
Agreed that the best implementation of BASIC was the BBC version. Second best I'd say was Locomotive BASIC as used on the Amstrad CPC series (my first computer was a CPC 464, but I later own a BBC B). Locomotive BASIC was influenced by BBC BASIC iirc.
Did you say "a cheaper version" or "a cheap perversion" @1:44?
A cheaper verison 😂
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.
Love your channel mate, this one was a great perspective on an underrated machine