Some time in 1977, a Viennese physicist and engineer, living in Cambridge, England, had a really good idea. Hermann Hauser was no pie in the sky dreamer, but a hard nosed entrepreneur. He looked at the early sproutings of the microcomputer revolution and realised that the big prize was a computer that could go anywhere.

He asked around, quietly, for someone who knew how to design microprocessor based circuitry. He was pointed at an undergraduate called Roger Wilson (now Sophie Wilson), a member of Cambridge University's Processor Group. Earlier that year, Wilson had designed a very neat controller for a cattle feeding system around the new MOS Technology 6502, so he clearly knew something about the subject.

Although a notebook computer was an unlikely product at the time, Hauser and Wilson appear to have agreed that a simple training system, which could form the core of a full fledged desktop computer, was quite probably a very saleable item. Clive Sinclair was already selling his MK14 kit in the U.K. but Hauser and Wilson seem to have believed, with some justification, that they could do better.

By the middle of 1978, Wilson had a prototype up and running. At the end of the year, Hauser set up Acorn Computers and they were ready to go.

The Acorn System 1 was a tiny computer built on two Euroboards linked by a wide, if rather short, ribbon cable. The Euroboard was one of several competing form factors for a standard circuit board. About 6 1/4 inches by 4 inches, the Euroboard was considerably smaller than the, de facto American standard, S100 board.

Wilson and Stephen Furber came up with a two board design that could, if desired, be housed in a rack casing, with a backplane linking the basic cards to additional memory and I/O cards. As sold, the basic unit carried a 256 Byte ROM and a single 256 Byte RAM chip, a simple cassette tape interface, a primitive but surprisingly effective keyboard and a single line LED display. This was pretty much the same specification as the MK14 but the Acorn unit was better designed and the cassette interface wasn't an optional extra, as in Sinclair's offering.

There was plenty of literature showing the rack mount case but it isn't clear whether Acorn ever sold any of these units.

I purchased a kit early in 1979, when I was servicing industrial dishwashers and spending considerable time dealing with failures in the discrete electronics of the pumps, which dispensed the detergents and rinse aids. I'd read a lot about the new microcomputers in Wireless World and Practical Electronics and came up with a theory that a microprocessor based system would be more reliable as a control device.

At least, that was my excuse. What I really wanted was a Nascom 1 but at a touch under £200, I couldn't really justify it. The £65 Acorn, though, was an altogether different proposition and I obtained permission from the “director of household affairs” to order one.

I built the kit on our kitchen table in a couple of evenings and it went together very well. I soon learned my way around the 6502's command set and wrote various simple routines. Of course, with 256 Bytes, I was very limited in what I could do but the cassette interface was extremely reliable and I could load stuff from tape in a matter of seconds.

When the time came to move on from the basic System 1 I was faced with a slight quandary. Should I spend a lot of money to buy the rack case and extra cards or should I buy an all in one system? In the end, the decision was made for me, as I mention in the article on the Sharp MZ-80k but I have occasionally wondered how different things might have been had I stuck with the Acorn product.

A great deal more can be found on Mike Cowlishaw's excellent site.