The Acorn Electron was a budget version of the BBC Micro educational/home computer made by Acorn Computers Ltd. It had 32 kilobytes of RAM, and its ROM memory included BBC BASIC along with its operating system.
The Electron was able to save and load programs onto audio cassette via a supplied converter cable that plugged into the microphone socket of any tape recorder. It was capable of basic graphics, and could display onto either a television set or a "green screen" monitor.
At its peak, the Electron was the third best selling micro in the United Kingdom, and total lifetime game sales for the Electron exceeded those of the BBC Micro. There are at least 500 known games for the Electron and the true total is probably in the thousands.
The hardware of the BBC Micro was emulated by a single customized ULA chip designed by Acorn. It had feature limitations such as being unable to output more than one channel of sound where the BBC was capable of three-way polyphony and the inability to provide teletext mode. The machine architecture also imposed a substantial speed decrease on applications running from RAM, although ROM applications ran at the same speed
