Acorn Advert - March 1980

Acorn's "System 1^[1]" - formerly known just as the Acorn Microcomputer - was launched in March 1979 and appears here in an early-1980 advert selling for £75 in kit form (or about £420 in 2024 money), which was broadly comparable to the cost of arch-rival Sinclair's MK14 of 1978.

It was designed by Sophie Wilson, who would later on, via the BBC Micro, design the first ARM instruction set - the design that has now sold billions and is in more than 90% of all smartphones ever made.

It would also have been similar in function to MOS Technology's KIM-1, as both were 6502 based and were intended as "self-teaching tools for beginners, a low-cost 6502 development platform, a control system or a lab data-acquisition system".

The System 1 was integer-only, which might make it sound like something a bit retro but is something that is still used by some modern embedded processors. Being integer-only helped to make it run faster, albeit at the expense of not being able to do floating-point arithmetic.

One particularly interesting commercial use of the System 1 would come in 1982 with Systems Control's "Smart Arm" robotic arm, which used it as its controller or "CPU".

For the breakthrough price of £430 (about £1,850 in 2024 money) for the educational Model 4E version, you got a robotic arm that had a reach of 200mm and could lift 50 grammes.

At the other end of the scale, £2,560 (£11,000) bought you the industrial 61 model, which could lift 1.5kg and reach out a metre.

The whole system was designed to be controlled by an Atom^[2], the next machine that Acorn would produce after a few more revisions of the System 1.

The machine that followed the Atom - the Proton, otherwise known as the BBC Micro, also ended up getting a robotic arm, thanks to a product launched for it by Droid Factory, the Abingdon-based company run by Tony Dyson - the man who made R2-D2 for the film Star Wars.

The robot arm, based on an industrial version but using servo motors to reduce power requirements, was available for only £400 (£1,510) and even came with interchangeable fingers^[3].