The Acorn Electron is a budget version of the BBC Micro educational / home computer made by Acorn Computers Ltd.

At its peak, the Electron was the third best selling micro in the United Kingdom, and total lifetime game sales for the Electron exceeded those of the BBC Micro.

The hardware of the BBC Micro was emulated by a single customized ULA chip designed by Acorn in conjunction with Ferranti.

Unlike the BBC Micro, the Edge-connector on the rear of the machine exposed almost all the Bus lines, but not all.

( via the total number of ports that the BBC Micro had, it exposed all lines )

Due to needing two accesses to each chip instead of one, and the complications of the video hardware also needing access, reading or writing RAM was much slower than on the BBC Micro.

The Electron was developed during 1983 as a cheap sibling for the BBC Micro with the intention of capturing the low-cost Christmas sales market for that year.

This was a blow from which the machine never fully recovered, although games sales for it would ultimately outstrip those of the BBC Micro.

This enabled the Electron to achieve the same functionality as that provided by the Expansion-ROM slot on the bottom-left of the BBC Micro B keyboard.

Because the WD1770 is capable of single density mode and uses the same IBM360 derived floppy disc format as the Intel 8271 found in the BBC Micro, it was also possible to run a DFS filing system with an alternate ROM, such as the P. R. E. S AP4 interface.

This behavior was the same as on the BBC Micro.

This made it possible to connect a 5¼ ” floppy disc drive as used by BBC Micro owners or a more common 3½ ” drive.

By providing extra storage this modification also allowed some games and applications intended for the BBC Micro to function on the Electron despite the lack of a native Mode 7.

Of the capabilities present in the BBC Micro but absent from the Electron, the teletext-style mode 7 was particularly conspicuous because of the very low memory usage in that mode ( just less than 1 kB ) and the high number of BBC programs that used it.

The first used the same graphics processor as the BBC Micro in mode 7 — the SAA5050 — but used software to ensure that it was fed with the correct graphics data.

Although this produced a mode 7 that barely impacted upon CPU performance and gave the same visual quality as the BBC Micro, it remained compatible only with software that used the ROM routines for outputting text and graphics and still used 10 kB of memory for the display.

The Electron is widely misquoted as operating at 1. 79 MHz after measurements derived from speed testing against the thoroughly 2 MHz BBC Micro for various pieces of ' common software '

Like the BBC Micro, the Electron was constrained by limited memory resources.

The traditional BBC Micro publishers such as Acornsoft, Superior Software and Micro Power offered the widest support.

See also the list of Acorn Electron games for a fairly comprehensive list of games published for the machine and: Category: BBC Micro and Acorn Electron games for a list of games with information on Wikipedia.

In the UK, the BBC Micro based OBBS software, available from Pace for use with their modems, optionally allowed for colour and graphics using the Teletext based graphics mode available on that platform.

The BBC News Channel moved from the Studio N8 set ( now home to BBC World News ) to what was the home of the national news in Studio N6, allowing the Channel to share its set with the BBC News at One and the BBC News at Ten – with other bulletins moving to studio TC7.

He was the travelling reporter for the highly acclaimed, but controversial, BBC mockumentary Ghostwatch, which tricked viewers into believing it was a live investigation into ghost sightings in a suburban home on Halloween night ( 1992 ).

In the private home computer market, where games were a significant driver, the Dragon suffered due to its graphical capabilities, which were inferior to contemporary machines such as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro.

A broad range of peripherals exist for the Dragon 32 / 64, and on top of this there are add-ons such as the Dragon's Claw which give the Dragons access to the BBC Micro's large range of accessories ( a particularly important factor in the UK home market ).

Edinburgh is also home to a flourishing group of contemporary composers such as Nigel Osborne, Peter Nelson, Lyell Cresswell, Hafliði Hallgrímsson, Edward Harper, Robert Crawford, Robert Dow and John McLeod whose music is heard regularly on BBC Radio 3 and throughout the UK.

* British minister's home bombed ( BBC ' On This Day ' article )

Bush House since became the home of the BBC World Service and the building itself has gained a global reputation with the audience of the service.

In the United Kingdom, according to the BBC, one in four retired greyhounds finds a home as a pet.

It is most commonly associated with the first wave of all-in-one 8-bit home computers and small business microcomputers ( such as the Apple II, Commodore 64, BBC Micro, and TRS 80 ).

Hereford is home to the Hereford Police Male Voice Choir who competed on the BBC TV show " Last Choir Standing ", and the Railway Choir.

BBC BASIC is a programming language, developed in 1981 as a native programming language for the MOS Technology 6502 based Acorn BBC Micro home / personal computer, mainly by Sophie Wilson.

The Doctor Who episode The Eleventh Hour, broadcast on BBC 1 on 3 April 2010, was filmed here, renamed " Leadworth ", the home of Amy Pond.

The DVD set also includes the only surviving ( and rather poor quality ) recording of Palin and Jones's comic BBC play Secrets from 1973, as well as a documentary by Michael Palin entitled Comic Roots in which he goes back to visit his home town.

Subsequently re-edited and retitled " Leslie Howard: The Man Who Gave a Damn ", the documentary was officially launched on 2 September 2011 in an event held at Leslie Howard's former home " Stowe Maries " in Dorking, and reported on BBC South News the same day ().

On a BBC Micro computer, the key generates an interrupt which would normally cause a warm restart of the computer.

Only a very few comparable DOSes were stored elsewhere than floppy disks ; among these exceptions were the British BBC Micro's optional Disc Filing System, DFS, offered as a kit with a disk controller chip, a ROM chip, and a handful of logic chips, to be installed inside the computer ; and Commodore's CBM DOS, located in a ROM chip in each disk drive.

* Disc Filing System ( DFS ) This was an optional component for the BBC Micro, offered as a kit with a disk controller chip, a ROM chip, and a handful of logic chips, to be installed inside the computer.

A British computer that used the 6502 was the BBC Micro, manufactured by Acorn, Ltd.

* Pipeline ( game ), a 1989 computer game for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron

According to BBC, 17 % of computer science students could not find work in their field 7 months after graduation in 2009 which was the highest rate of the university majors surveyed while 0 % of medical students were unemployed in the same survey.

In the BBC television series Blake's 7, the computer character Slave was described by Peter Tuddenham, who voiced it, as "... a Uriah Heep type of character ...."

The distinctive appearance of Triceratops has led to them being frequently depicted in films, computer games and documentaries, including the Don Bluth film The Land Before Time, which featured a young Triceratops as a main character, the 1993 film Jurassic Park and the 1999 BBC television documentary Walking with Dinosaurs.

It is a version of the BASIC programming language adapted for a UK computer literacy project of the BBC.

Acorn's BBC Micro computer dominated the UK educational computer market during the 1980s and early 1990s.

After achieving success with the BBC Micro computer, Acorn Computers Ltd considered how to move on from the relatively simple MOS Technology 6502 processor to address business markets like the one that would soon be dominated by the IBM PC, launched in 1981.

The Archimedes won significant market share in the education markets of the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand ; the success of the Archimedes in British schools was due partly to its predecessor the BBC Micro and later to the Computers for Schools scheme organised by the Tesco supermarket chain in association with Acorn, and most students and pupils in these countries in the early 90s were exposed to an Archimedes or A-series computer.

The Cambridge Computer Z88 is an A4-size, lightweight, portable Z80-based computer with a built-in combined word processing / spreadsheet / database application called PipeDream, along with several other applications and utilities, such as a Z80-version of the BBC BASIC programming language.

* Tube ( BBC Micro ), an expansion bus on the BBC Micro computer

In 1983, Ceefax started to broadcast computer programs, known as telesoftware, for the BBC Micro ( a home computer available in the United Kingdom ).