Acorn Atom

Acorn had little interest in home computing, building machines for labs and engineers, and had no plans to switch lanes. However, when Curry heard of the Sinclair ZX80 he conceived the Atom project to target the fledgling consumer market. Curry met considerable resistance from his colleagues and went out on a limb to get the Atom project off the ground; some at Acorn saw the home market as beneath them and not an area worth investing in.

Curry won the argument and the result was the Atom, a self-enclosed version of the Acorn System 3 placed inside the keyboard. Sold in either kit or assembled form, it was released in March 1980 and went head to head with the ZX80. While slightly more expensive than the ZX80 (£120 v £100) it was a little more polished in the way it presented itself. The Atom’s full-size keyboard was superior to the ZX80’s membrane, and it shipped with 2K RAM instead of the 1K of the ’80.

Like its later sibling, the BBC Micro, the Atom was designed to be expandable. RAM could be upgraded to 12K and an additional ROM for floating-point maths could be installed. A graphics card was also made available, and the 256x192 monochrome mode was considered a very high resolution for the time.

The Atom was a modest success, selling 10,000 units (versus the ZX80’s 50,000). What it did do was establish a beachhead for Acorn in the home computing market and lay the foundation for the subsequent BBC Micro, which would have a crucial role to play in computing history.