As the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) stepped up their involvement in the Computer Literacy Project - a campaign seeking to increase public awareness of computers - it soon became known that they were looking to form a partnership with a British computing manufacturer. The BBC required a home computer to complement their upcoming television series and, as nothing on the market at the time was deemed to be suitable, they issued a specification list to which the new micro must conform and invited proposals from the leading manufacturers. Time began to pass and without there being any concrete progress, the BBC was forced into revising its original specification.

The most notable difference in the new spec was the call for a 6502-based processor, rather than the CP/M based Z80 that had originally been specified. This suddenly brought the Proton into the reckoning - the home computer which Acorn Computers of Cambridge had been developing as a successor to their flagship micro, the 12k Acorn Atom.

In April 1981 - after having fought off competition from the likes of Clive Sinclair and Dragon Computers - Herman Hauser and Chris Curry of Acorn were rewarded with the contract and gleefully accepted their prize: the right to produce and market a machine bearing the prestigious 'BBC' brand name. After the deal was finalised, the Proton became the BBC Microcomputer and was subsequently launched onto the market in 1982.

The BBC Micro was originally available in two flavours: the 16k Model A (£235, later increased to £299) and the 32k Model B (£335, later increased to £399). It was assumed that the Model A would be the more popular of the two, as they predicted the high price of the latter would deter the home market, thus making it the exclusive forte of enthusiasts, educational establishments and small businesses.

However, they were proved wrong - the Model A was lacking a number of key interfaces that severely restricted the potential of the machine in terms of expansion. In addition to this, certain hi-colour/hi-res graphic modes were unavailable on the Model A; a consequence of having just half the memory of the superior Model B. This prompted authors and publishers alike to overlook the A when it came to programming and releasing software. An A-B upgrade kit was available at a cost of £135 and many users of the Model A took this option. The Model B, meanwhile, went on to monopolise the education sector and also fared admirably in the home market - this is despite Acorn suffering immense problems meeting demand throughout the early period.

As sales of the cut-down Model A were underachieving in the budget sector of the market, it became clear that a new machine with a fresh identity was required. So in 1983 along came the 32k Acorn Electron, which retailed at £199 (NB. the Electron did NOT bear the BBC's logo). By mid 1984, production of the BBC Model A had ceased, leaving the Electron free to take up its position as Acorn's primary contender at the lower end of the home computing market.

As the Electron OS and BASIC Roms were almost identical to those found inside the BBC Micro, a lot of BBC software was compatible with the Electron and vice-versa. But as the Electron retailed at just 50% of the price of its bigger brother, Acorn clearly had to make some compromises in terms of design and performance. Aside from the obvious aesthetic differences (physically, the 'Elk' was less than half the size of a BBC), the most significant distinction between the two systems was speed: programs would almost certainly run more slowly on an Electron.

The Elk also suffered on the audio front as it boasted just one sound channel in comparison to the three channels found on a BBC Micro. Support for MODE 7 graphics was also lacking - not only did this mean the Electron was incapable of displaying teletext characters, all the associated benefits of this memory-generous (1k!) mode went out the window too. So Electron owners were deprived of all those lengthy BBC text adventures written by the likes of Level 9 ... unless of course they were privileged enough to own the 64k Master Ram Board upgrade!

Sadly, the Electron gained the unfortunate tag of being a 'cut down BBC Micro' and was rarely regarded as a microcomputer in its own right. It was still superior to similarly-priced machines of the period, but a price war between Sinclair and the other rival manufacturers soon wiped whatever chances of market domination the Electron may have had. Perhaps its most notable accomplishment was ousting the BBC Micro from third spot in the hardware charts, whilst the Commodore 64 and 48k Spectrum lead the field.

BBC & Electron games software was never as plentiful as on other formats and most of the major players in the software industry (e.g. Imagine, Elite, US Gold etc) had deserted the Acorn scene by 1987/8. However, both machines enjoyed continued software support from a small number of loyal companies (such as Superior, Tynesoft and Audiogenic) right through until 1991 - not a bad run!

There were three main progressions of the BBC computer in the 1980s - the first was the 64k Model B+ in 1985, which from the outside, was indistinguishable from the Model B. Internally though, it boasted two key differences: 32k of Shadow RAM (in addition to the 32k main memory) and a 1770 based disk interface (as opposed to the 8271 DFS present in most DFS-enabled versions of the Model B). The B+ did not sell in great numbers and was generally regarded as a stopgap between the BBC B and the BBC Master 128, which was released in January 1986.

The 128k Master had a distinctly larger footprint than the previous BBCs and, like the B+, it featured a 1770 disk interface. It also came pre-installed with an advanced version of the disk filing system (appropriately named the ADFS), though the more common DFS was also retained for the sake of compatibility. Other notable differences were two ROM cartridge slots (as featured on the Electron Plus 1 expansion unit), 64k of main memory and 64k of sideways RAM, a numeric keypad and a real time clock.

Shortly after the release of the Master came the BBC Master Compact, which had a working title of the Baby BBC. Technically, the Compact was very similar to the Master, though visually, it was a different kettle of fish altogether. In previous machines, the keyboard, PSU and motherboard were all housed in one unit and external disk drives had to be added independently. The Compact however featured a separate, PC-styled keyboard that was linked to a slimline base unit via cable; the base unit featured a built-in 3.5" drive and the familiar DFS filing system was scrapped in favour of the more versatile ADFS system. This was significant as BBC computers had traditionally been associated with 5.25" DFS format disks. There had also been a number of cost-cutting omissions on the Compact, for example the cassette and TV out sockets were no more.

The release of the 32-bit Archimedes in 1987 gave Acorn a much needed burst of rejuvenation in the marketplace, for, like the BBC Micro back in '82, it was well ahead of its time in terms of quality and price. The 'Arc' was based around the ARM Reduced Instruction Set Chip (RISC) which Acorn had been developing for the previous four years and, at the bare minimum, it succeeded in prolonging Acorn's dominance of the educational sector. But this is where this brief historical write-up (and focus of this website in general) comes to an end. Acorn continued producing systems based on the Archimedes/RISC architecture right up until their demise in 1998; however, variants of Acorn machines are still being produced to this day by the likes of Castle and Advantage Six. Robert McMordie hosts an excellent technical history of Acorn Computers which is well worth checking out if you want to get clued up on everything Acorn.

For a better insight into the early days of Acorn Computers and the Computer Literacy Project, check out the BBC Micro reviews in the Hardware section.