Acorn Advert - January 1984

This was one of several similar adverts for the BBC Micro which ran for a few months. They all follow a pattern of showing various things that the BBC - aka Proton - was good at, along with a lot of text explaining the stories in detail.

This particular advert features stories about the 12 BBC Micros in Perin's Community School in Hampshire which were helping schoolchildren to take their GCE 'O' Level in computing, and a BBC in use at Jodrell Bank near Goostrey in Cheshire, where apparently one was in use to calculate corrections for the parabolic mirror of the Defford radio telescope.

The Defford telescope isn't actually at the Goostrey site, but is situated in Worcestershire. It is however part of the eMERLIN radio-telescope managed from Jodrell Bank.

There's also mention of John Richardson, a Preston pharmacist who was the first to use a microcomputer to print out medicine-bottle labels - thus solving problems of legibility, stock control and adding extra safety information to the labels, all at the same time and all automatically.

This eventually evolved into the Sunrise pharmacy medication record (PMR) system, which was renamed Pharmacy Manager in 2001^[1].