Acorn Electron and Plus 1 Expansion

The Acorn Electron was introduced as direct competition for computers priced at the cheaper end of the home computing market in the early to mid 1980's such as the range of low end computers produced by Sinclair. With cut down expandability, the Electron was intended to be on the whole compatible with it's big brother, the BBC Microcomputer and in general achieved that aim but did have some significant differences such as a lack of support for the MODE 7 screen mode and a single channel sound generator as opposed to the BBC Micro's three channels + 1 noise channel.

Acorn Electron and Plus 1 Expansion

The Acorn Electron Plus 1 Expansion unit connects to the Acorn Electron by way of an edge connector on the rear of the Electron and provided a Parallel port, Analogue port and two Cartridge slots for ROMs and other hardware to be connected to.

Expansions fitted to this Electron

The Electron in action

So here we have my modified Electron in action, listing the commands available in ROM and then using some of the extra features of the enhanced Plus 1 ROM to list all the ROMs in the machine.

Repair/Change History

The Electron was suffering from a few minor issues when it came into my possession so needed some TLC to sort it out. The case was filthy and there was a serious crack on the right hand corner that stretched the full height of the front corner of the case. Not only was the case cracked but there was (and still is) a piece missing. The computer was stripped down and thoroughly cleaned and the crack was repaired with some plastic weld. On re-assembly, the keyboard was found to have some defective key switches so they were replaced restoring the Electron to full working order.

In September 2011, the original Acorn Plus 1 ROM was replaced with the Slogger Electron Expansion ROM v2.02 which provides greater functionality for the Plus 1 by way of extra * commands such as *ROMS and *JOYSTICK to name just two.