Barry Woods time travels back five years into the Electron's past	Visit The Scan Section
Originally published in Electron User 7.06

FIVE years may not be a long time to you or me, but to a micro it is a lifetime. In fact, some computers have been born, lived and died in much shorter time spans. The Electron however proudly continues ever onwards, and though it may now be in its twilight years, it has outlasted many competitors.

Five years ago this month the Electron was at its peak. The good news from Acorn was that it had just slashed the price of its baby Beeb by £70 to £129. This was expected to be a shot in the arm to sustain the current high level of sales and followed news that 100,000 Electrons had been sold in the previous Christmas sales period.

Also report in Electron User's March 1985 news pages were Interflora's plans to place special terminals based on the Electron's motherboard in each of its 2,500 shops. The aim was to replace the telephone for transmitting orders around the country. The machine had a built-in auto-dial, auto-answer modem, VDU, dot matrix printer and associated software.

It sounds like a sure firm recipe for a successful micro and it's a pity it was never made available to the public.

MINI OFFICE, the chart topping business software package had just been released for the Electron and was selected as a national teaching aid. It was to be incorporated as part of a series of special courses held throughout the UK to link education with industry.

Acorn had just released the Plus 3 disc expanion unit which sported two revolutionary features that were to pave the way for future Acorn developments - the 3.5in disc drive and ADFS (Advanced Disc Filing System). Both of these have since been incorporated in Acorn products, but at the time they were completely new ideas.

The Master, developed later, incorporated the ADFS and the Master Compact also had 3.5in discs too. The new Archimedes also sports ADFS and 3.5in discs and can read and write to those Electron Plus 3 discs created way back in 1985.

Good news for games players - software was flooding onto the market at a tremendous rate, with excellent titles such as OVERDRIVE and SMASH AND GRAB from Superior, WONGO, ULTRON, WARP ONE, MERRY CHRISTMAS SANTA, SPACE STATION ALPHA and ZORAKK THE CONQUEROR from Icon, FRENZY from Micro Power, MR. MEN from Mirrorsoft and many more titles.

Pete Bibby's marathon running Introduction to Programming had reached Part 14 with an examination of logical operators. Roland Waddilove reviewed a cut down version of S-PASCAL from Acornsoft and Roger Frost presented an entertaining game called Percy's Panic.

One of the most popular features of Electron User back in March 1985 was Scrapbook; a compilation of short, entertaining and interesting programs. It was a forerunner of the 10 Liners feature in today's magazine.

Below I have reproduced Eye by P. Charlesworth of West Yorkshire from Mrach 1985 Scrapbook. It uses MOVE and DRAW commands to produce a fascinating pattern.

And that rounds up this month's trip down memory lane. Next time I'll set the time controls for April 1984. Can you recall what was making the news back then?