Acorn Advert - December 1979
From Practical Computing
Acorn Computer: Four of a kind!
It's another early advert from Acorn Computer - the trading name of Cambridge Processor Unit Limited (CPU), the company set up in 1978 by Chris Curry - formerly of Sinclair Radionics, and his friend Hermann Hauser.
It shows the Acorn CPU - a Rockwell 6502-based board which also acted as the base board for the company's System 1, also shown in the advert and which retailed for £65, or about £440 in 2024. The bare 6502 board was only £35, or £240 now.
The main focus of the advert is Acorn's VDU Interface card, another of the company's Eurocard-standard boards and which used the MC6845 and SAA5050 chips.
It also shows that the VDU interface was able to generate teletext/viewdata characters. The world's first broadcast viewdata service - BBC's Ceefax - and the ITV's Oracle system, as well as dial-up Viewdata service Prestel, had also been launched in 1979, so this would have been cutting-edge stuff.
Acorn's experience with Viewdata would help it a few years later when it launched its Teletext and Prestel adapters for the BBC Micro.
The last card of the four in the advert is Acorn's 8K memory card. This retailed for £95, or about £650 in 2024. That's only £82 a kilobyte, or about £89 million a gigabyte. That's a significant drop from the £190 million a gigabyte memory cost just two years before.
Date created: 09 January 2024
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