sparrowfall.nz

---

My first computer

My first computer, if you discount my childhood abacus, was the Acorn Atom which was manufactured by Acorn Computers back in 1980. That year marked the start of the Home Computer era in the UK and saw many hopefuls enter the market but which basically had three main players being Acorn, Commodore and Sinclair.

The Acorn Atom came in two options, ready made and a build your own version. The latter was considerably cheaper than the ready built option and, for an impoverished teen, it was the only way to obtain one. A few days of solder fumes, expletives and banging ones head against the wall, I had a working Atom!

The basic features were a 1MHz 6502 CPU plus a whopping 2K of memory and a 8K ROM. Oh, the 2K memory, only 25% of that was allocated for user program space. Despite those limitations, you could do quite a lot with it and I'm still impressed even today. The machine had upgrade options for memory etc but I never got around to those as I was happy enough with the stock model. Several months later, the Atoms succesor arrived in the form of the BBC Micro and my attention turned to saving my pounds (all 400 of them) to get it.

I parted company with the Acorn Atom to help finance the BBC Micro. Now looking back I wished I had kept this computer, oh well...

There was a healthy rivalry between Acorn and Sinclair and, their users too! Personally, I could never entertain the ZX series as they didn't feel like computers to me due to a lack of a real tactile keyboard. Having said this, Sinclair did bring the home computer to many people at an affordable price.

There is an entertaining docudrama on YouTube called Micro Men. This is about the Sinclair/Acorn rivalry and how it played out.

At the end of the Home Computer era, both declined and became history. Acorn's legacy lives on due to their invention of the ARM CPU which powers many small, low power devices such as the Raspberry Pi.

---