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

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

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

Technical information

CPU: MOS Technology 6502A
Clock rate: 1.79 MHz
Coprocessor: Custom ULA
RAM: 32 KB
ROM: 32 KB
Text modes: 20×32, 40×25, 40×32, 80×25, 80×32
Graphics modes: 160×256 (4 or 16 colours), 320×256 (2 or 4 colours), 640×256 (2 colours)
Colours: 8 colours + 8 flashing versions of the same colours
Sound: 1 channel of sound + 1 channel of white noise, 7 octaves; built-in speaker
Dimensions: 16×34×6.5 cm
I/O ports: Expansion port, tape recorder connector (1200 baudIn telecommunications and electronics, baud is a measure of the "signaling rate" which is the number of changes to the transmission media per second in a modulated signal. It is named after Emile Baudot, the inventor of the Baudot code for telegraphy.), aerial TV connector ( RF modulatorAn RF modulator (for radio frequency modulator) is a small device that takes an input signal and outputs radio frequency-modulated signals. Most commonly these are found in home computers or video game systems that display graphics on a television receive), RGB video monitor output
Power supply: External PSU, 18 VThe volt is the SI derived unit for electric potential and voltage (derived from the ampere and watt). It is named in honor of Alessandro Volta, who, in 1800, invented the voltaic pile, the first chemical battery. The volt is defined as the potential diff

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