Acorn Advert - May 1979

This is probably Acorn's very first advert - it does indeed say "introducing Acorn" - and appeared just a few months after the company's founding as Cambridge Processor Unit (CPU) in November 1978.

The company was founded by Chris Curry - previously of Sinclair Radionics - and Hermann Hauser, with some assistance from Andy Hopper of Orbis Limited.

Orbis was a company Hopper had already co-founded with Hauser - who he met at a Darwin College disco - in order to sell Maurice Wilkes' Cambridge Ring network. Orbis would itself would become a division of Acorn in 1979^[1].

Meanwhile, CPU had originally started out as a consultancy - a choice possibly influenced by the success of Cambridge Consultants Ltd - with its first project being for Ace Coin Equipment (ACE), a coin-operated gaming machine supplier based in Mid Glamorgan, Wales.

An ACE 3210 fruit machine, possibly using CPU's microproessor controller. From Contact, 1978The contract was to help ACE transition from its older electro-mechanical machines over to microprocessor-operated systems, which could be easily reprogrammed for different games, thus significantly extended the life of the hardware.

Steve Furber worked on the initial processing hardware, using National Semicondutors' SC/MP "Scamp" processors, with much of the rest of the gaming hardware created by Chris Turner.

Sophie Wilson also contributed some anti-radio-interference circuitry, which apparently prevented the machine from crashing and paying out too much money^[2].

The gaming controller hardware was assembled onto readily-available double-height Eurocard modules, and it didn't take long before what was already a fairly general-purpose controller naturally evolved into CPU's first home-grown hardware product - the Acorn-branded professional MPU card, later called the Acorn Controller.

This was - unsurprisingly - also a "general purpose industrial controller" in a Eurocard format, with perhaps the only significant change that it was now running MOS Technology's 6502 CPU - the same CPU used in the contemporary Commodore PET, Apple II and Microtan 65, among others.

However, the advert also mentions that by adding a Eurocard hexadecimal keyboard and a cassette-tape interface to the Acorn, it was possible to create the Acorn Microcomputer, which was essentially a stand-alone microcomputer, albeit one without a case.

The controller along with the Acorn Microcomputer - which would become known as the System 1 - plus various memory modules, VDU cards and ROM software cards, remained as Acorn's bread-and-butter until the company's breakthrough Atom in the spring of 1980, which was about when the original ACE project was wound up.

The complete micro was available as a kit for £70.20, or ready-assembled for £81, which is about £580 in 2025.