Acorn’s would-be ZX Spectrum killer, the Electron, is 30 The Sinclair Spectrum made the Acorn Electron inevitable. In June 1982, less than two months after Sinclair had unveiled the Spectrum - which had still not shipped, of course, even though Sinclair had promised the first Spectrums would be in punters’ hands by the end of May - Acorn co-founder Hermann Hauser was heard talking …
If they haven't been powered up for a long time you may be disappointed.
Old chips had pnp layers with large depletion zones. Powering up removed these zones and allowed current to flow.
Over time, the depletions zones can actually get so large that when it draws enough power to ovecome them, the chip fries :(
Its funny, I always felt sorry for the other kids who didn't have an Electron. I not only (and proudly) owned an Electron, but had a Plus 1 and a Plus 3 (3.5 inch floppy disks when everyone else was using 5.25 inch, It was like I was in Star Trek!) I even owned a Kensington Joystick port and had my electron upgraded by Slogger with a Turbo/64k memory upgrade. Spent many hours playing games and programming. When I first joined O-Level Computer Studies (late during Form 4), I was amazed as I could already program BBC Basic, leaving my classmates in the dust. I still remember my IT teacher saying you couldn't find out how much memory a program took, so I taught him HIMEM, TOP and PAGE. My friends spent too much time playing Jet Set Willy on their ZX Spectrums. Meanwhile I even got to Play ELITE before them, Commodore and Spectrum users had to wait a few years for Firebird to port it.
I even learned to type (really typing without looking and using an electric typewriter), so I could type programs from Electron User magazine, and I didn't need to learn the RUBBER keyboard, I had a proper one. All I ever saw were Spectrum users with problems (remember the Spectrum plus, if you took it out of the box upside down, the keys fell out!). Yes I loved my Electron and maybe the little boy inside me still does. Problem is, the 30 year tag has me now as a dinosaur compared to the people I now work with (usually their first computer ran Windows XP!).
Mannnn, never had an electron butdid have the xx spectrum with the cassette drive. It used to take 15-20 minutes to load up a game and then sometimes would crash tight at the end but bringing my friends over to play on my "sick" computer was awesome fun and is definitely one of my strongest early childhood memories.
My Electron is on the shelf as a constant reminder along with a Cumana disk drive, Slogger Disk Interface a PRES Plus 1 and a Viewsheet cartridge. I bought all the Input magazines (still have them somewhere) and read stories about older types who had bought houses by writing computer games. I wanted to get into this and do the same! Didn't happen though. I didn't leave enough time to complete my computer studies O level programs, so I had to borrow one. I flunked the exam by not documenting the programs properly. I also flunked my other exams, but used the electron until 2003 to do job applications and CV's, when the Star LC-10 printer finally packed up in March, shortly before my father died. It still works after 30 years, which is, I believe, a testament to it. It lives on along with all the games in a couple of emulators, where you can crank it up to the speed of a BBC B. Ransack (the only game I played on both machines) is absolutely nuts at 800% faster than normal!
I ended up with two electrons both with plus 1 expansion packs, one with the plus 3 (3.5"" floppy drive).
I learned pascal and a pit of lisp via the cartridge slots.
Best thing was you could slave the two together via the RS423 port, use one machine for graphics (i.e. use the full 20k for modes 01,2,3 but still retain the memory on the other machine for your programs.
OK not good for real time graphics, but I cut my teeth on ray tracing with some quite complex models in memory. Took about a week to render.
Also one of the best keyboards I've ever used.
Oh jeez, you're talking about the Acorn Atom too. I had one of those. It had 12k of RAM (I think 5k was used for ROM actually, or the screen or something, I can't remember). It also had really annoying "snow" on the screen whenever you did graphics (if you didn't know about interrupts to get the timing right, which I didn't at the time).
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