That's How It Happened

The Acorn Electron was my first computer. It was released as a budget version of the BBC B, and I think I got one for my 7th birthday in 1984. The computer had only 32Kb of RAM, which is 1/16000th of the amount my current iBook shipped with. All the games had to be loaded from tape, which was agonisingly slow and error prone. Complicated games would require saves to be made onto a separate blank tape, or else squeezed in after the program code had ended, if you were confident about not overwriting it.
It was a golden age of 8-bit gaming. Important games such as Elite (from where we get the word l33t) were available, as well as hundreds of extremely anglo-centric titles like, Ian Botham's Test Match, and ShedMaster Finsbury Park. Delightfully there is an excellent crossplatform emulator: ElectrEm, and a huge number of games available for free download.

Tags: electron, emulation,