Computers COMPUTERS

Acorn Electron

  1. Home
    2. >
  2. Computers
    3. >
  3. Acorn Electron

As the first home computer I ever saw, the Acorn Electron was a bit of a disappointment design-wise.

The Acorn Electron had a cream plastic case that looked like you should lift off the top to reveal a secret compartment with lots of chocolates inside! The Acorn Electron was surrounded with a kind-of kitsch chic.

Saving and loading everything to and from cassette tapes was a real bind. You needed to make sure the volume of the tape player was just right otherwise everything went wrong. And trust me, 45 minutes into loading "Repton" or "Eddie Kidd's Stunt Challenge" it wasn't much fun to see the famous lines:

F 06
F 07
F 08
ERROR
F 09
ERROR
F 10
ERROR

It signalled just one thing: press CTRL+"break" and retype CHAIN"" in order to start the load all over again. ARGH!

Still, at least you could program it quite well:

10 CLS
20 MODE 2
30 COLOUR 11 (flashing cyan and red!)
40 PRINT "HELLO!"
50 GOTO 40

Ahhh, what fun.

Suggest an update

Author of this article:



Contributors to this article:

  • There are no contributors yet

Message boards

Discuss Acorn Electron on the message boards

Do You Remember Acorn Electron?

Do You Remember Acorn Electron?

  • Anonymous user
    on
    My Dad bought one back in 82 I think; primarily by saying he could do his finances using Mini Office as some kind of justification to get electronics in the house. Ours came with that big bumper pack of elecron gamesm such as Snapper, Boxer, Sphynx Adventure, etc. Classics were Felix In The Factory, Twin Kingdom Valley, Bandits at 3 O'Clock, Frenzy, Positron, Jet Boot Jack.... ahh
  • Anonymous user
    on
    My first ever computer was an Acorn Electron in 1987. I thought it was brilliant! Agnetha.
  • Anonymous user
    on
    My Dad bought me an Electron from some local store and it came in a pack with three games: Snapper (like Pac-Man), Killer Gorilla (like Donkey Kong) and Monsters (like nothing else, but still bloomin' good fun). Elite was superb, but tricky to get into. I remember the Acorn Electron magazine and my favourite bit each edition was where you followed the instructions and typed in a basic program to make a sound. It, originally, was called "Sounds" I think. You could make such audio treats such as a police car siren and gun-shots. Fab!
  • Anonymous user
    on
    anyone remember playing elite on the electron, a great game for its time
  • Anonymous user
    on
    Wow The acorn electron. Got one to share between me and my sis one xmas when i was about 5. My main memories were playing football manager, escape from moonbase alpha and a particularly good pinball game. I also remember that the sound came out of the keyboard so turning your tv off didnt shut it up......man I miss that thing.
  • Anonymous user
    on
    I am still the owner of my Acorn Electron. I got it for Christmas when i was 8years old and still have it now i am 31. I have about 80 games. The 'I' Key is slightly dodgy now from typing CHAIN so often to load games. I just can not part with it. It was my best friend for years!!!
  • Anonymous user
    on
    I never personally owned an Electron, by my mate Paul did. The one big thing I remember playing on it was Bandits at 3'oclock. It was a superb game where you had to shoot down the other players plane, whilst avoiding the scenery. As far as the machine itself goes - the description pretty much hits it on the head. It always took 3-4 tried to get Bandits loaded, in the end my mate mostly solved the propblem by sticking a heavy book on the cassette lid.

Do you remember these?