Acorn Advert - March 1983

Acorn churned out a lot of adverts around this time which were broadly similar: a BBC Micro doing something, with reams of text explaining it.

This one - whilst even more wordy than usual - is interesting in that it neatly sums up the state of the Department of Industry's schemes, such as Micros Into Secondary Schools (MISS) and Micros into Primary Schools (MIPS).

The scheme allowed schools to claim 50% of the cost of a micro, as long as it was from an approved list. This list was quite short and included Acorn - producer of the BBC Literacy Project's microcomputer, Research Machines - manufacturer of the long-lived 380Z, and after a lot of lobbying, Sinclair's Spectrum.

The BBC Micro was indeed far ahead of the others - by November 1982, only three of 422 applications made for the MISS scheme had been for Sinclair's machine, with 97 for RM's 380Z and the remainder - 322 - being for Acorn's BBC. That's actually more like 80%.

Sinclair even ended up running its own £15 million scheme to try and get more of its Spectrums into schools^[1]