Acorn Electron #001
July-August 2018
I bought this little Electron on a bit of a whim in the Summer of 2018. I’d long wanted to bring my childhood Sinclair ZX Spectrum back to life, but I had no idea how to go about it, and I was flicking through eBay to see how much old 8-bit computers are worth nowadays, when I saw this one for sale, untested and for ‘parts or repair’, and decided to bid on it, not expecting to win. But of course I did - a double-edged sword I was to confront with some frequency in the years to follow.
Anyway, I paid £30 for it, including postage, from St Luke’s Hospice in Plymouth and when it arrived I was quite excited as I’d never played with an Electron back in the day and I was keen to see if I could get it working. This may have contributed to my then eight-year old son Flynn taking an interest in it and helping me take it out of all of its packaging. He wanted to help me get it working, so we resolved to do it together…
Unpacking & disassembly
Flynn really enjoyed taking the little machine out of its packaging (and getting inside it!), and liked the tactile keyboard straight away.
And here’s the Electron as it came out of the box. I bit dirty, but in very good condition.
We thought it would be best to take it apart and clean it before trying to switch it on.
(Nowadays, I’d almost certainly see if there’s any life straight away!)
It was genuinely exciting to see the famous Ferranti ULA in it’s little metal cage. FIngers crossed it still works!
Out of its case, the keyboard is quite a lot filthier than it initially looked!
All the components are out of the case and ready for cleaning and testing.
Testing & cleaning
Flynn learned how to test for continuity by following the power rail around the board.
The power supply all checks out, so that’s promising.
Time to take all the keys off. Turns out fixing up old computers is a lot of fun!
Pretty grotty…
Much better!
Now we need to clean all the keys with a toothbrush in warm soapy water.
Time consuming but also quite therapeutic. Flynnie wasn’t having any of it though.
Meanwhile, it’s time to see if this old thing still actually turns on - and it DOES!
As long as the keyboard is connected, that is. There was a fair bit of child-safe swearing before we figured that out. Great puddles of poo!
Retrobrighting
The next thing we wanted to try out, before putting it all back together again, was retrobrighting to reverse the yellowing the plastic case and keys had experienced with age.
We’d read a lot about it and watched YouTube videos, and decided the best way was to paint everything with peroxide cream and then cover it with cling film.
We then put the case and keys outside in the afternoon sunshine for several hours, turning them round every 30 minutes or so to ensure they got an even amount of sunlight.
After washing off all the peroxide, all the plastic parts came out great! Really impressed and pleased with how evenly the effect worked and how much brighter it all is.
Reassembly
Before putting it all back together, I added a jumper across link LK4, which is adds a colour signal to the Electron’s composite output (I have no idea why that isn’t the default - did that many people have black and white TVs in 1983?)
Everything cleaned, tested and back in the lower case.
And likewise with the keyboard, although more on this later...
Back on go the keys. It really is a quality keyboard for such a cheap and simple machine. Very much an Acorn rather than a Sinclair.
And a final test to make sure it still all works, and all the keys register correctly.
Finished!
And here’s it is all cleaned up
It really turned out well. And I’m glad it did, because if it hadn’t I would never have dived into this hobby to the depths I since have :)
It honestly looks like new.
Loading games
The Electron came with a few games and manuals, and so, once we’d bought and refurbished an appropriate tape deck, Flynn and I attepted to load Meteors.
GoSDC
A while later, we also bought a GoSDC device from John Kortink, which provides SD card storage for floppy disk and tape images, for the Electron and its bigger BBC brothers.
The device plugs into the expansion socket at the back of the Electron, and takes a full-size SD card.
There is some configuration required, and I had to learn about the various disk formats that were available for these machines, as well as how expansion ROMs work, but the documentation is good and everything worked exactly as advertised.
Pretty soon we managed to get a whole load of new games working, and they were much (much!) faster and quiter to load.
Big thanks to John Kortink for designing and making such a useful device - do check out his website if you fancy one yourself!
