Acorn's Electron looks set to be the hit micro of 1983. Memories of the euphoria that surrounded the painful launch of the BBC Micro are recalled by the excitement generated by the Electron.

But the machine itself holds no such surprises. It's a cut down BBC, pure and simple, with just eight chips replacing the BBC's expensive and complicated board. It runs MOS 1.0 and BASIC 2.

Nevertheless it would be a mistake to view the Electron as a poor man's Beeb. It's minus a fair number of features, in particular the BBC's copious interfacing, but even so, it will come as a shock to the cheap end of the market.

The Electron comes in an anonymous cardboard box, a tradition few manufacturers cling onto. Inside, it's a very complete package - you get machine, oversize power supply, TV and cassette lead, introductory cassette and two manuals.

The 'welcome' cassette is a mixture of new and converted BBC programs. Its little booklet has been moved into the User Guide, but first timers will find it an easy way to meet their machine.

Fortunately, Acorn has gone to town on the documentation. The BBC-style User Guide is a bit smaller and a bit better organised,although much of it is copied wholesale from the original. You also get Start Programming with the Electron by Masoud Yazdani. This is the 'from scratch' tutorial that was such an ironic omission from the educational BBC Micro. Yazdani is friendly, lively and ever so structured!

It's an excellent introduction to the Electron, and I'll lay odds on a BBC edition soon. But it is very BBC-Basic specific. Oh well. At least it puts a stop to all those 'Learn your micro on the bus home' books that the pulp publishers keep churning out.

But nobody's perfect. The Electron User Guide is probably a good source for information on Basic 2. Contrary-wise, the BBC's User Guide is a good source for Electron *FX calls. This will create a nice market in manual photocopies. But for some bizarre reason Acorn has declined to document all the available calls. And it has also skimped on technical info like what goes on in the expansion connector and so on. And it's worth nothing that our sample User Guide speedily fell to pieces.

The Electron is beautifully designed and built - quite a shock compared to the BBC. Its designer case will look great on the coffee table. Certainly, the serious look will appeal to those put off by construction of the Spectrum and Dragon ilk. The looks conceal a small board running with just eight chips - the 6502, two 16K ROMs, four 16K bit RAM chips and an all-singing, all-dancing 64 pin ULA. The design raises all sorts of issues.

For starters, on this issue 1 board, you have separate MOS and Basic chips. Production models (the ones nobody's seen) will have a single ROM socket. So in theory on this machine you could pull out BASIC and stuff something like the VIEW word processor in. In practice, it won't be possible on the Electron.

Next the RAM, 32K is produced by some clever decoding with the ULA. This requires two addresses to each chip to read a whole memory location. Result: the Electron goes slower than you'd expect.

The ULA also provides the display - there isn't a 6845 as there is on a BBC. Screen generation also slows the machine down, and not having a 6845 precludes some tricks like positioning the screen with *TV and the fast sideways scrolling used on some arcade games.

Curiously enough, some display modes are faster than others. Benchmarks reveal Modes 0 to 2 to be the slowest and Modes 4, 5 and 6 to be the fastest. Mode 3 is a touch faster than the slow modes, apparently simply because of unused scan lines between each screen line!

The keyboard is unrivalled on cheap machines, except perhaps by the Vic 20. The nearest thing to it is the Lynx, and perfectionists may complain of similar blunt fingers and a 'dead feel'. But the layout is remarkably good. You can get a complete keyboard in just 56 keys. Ten programmable function keys are available by holding down FUNC and pressing a number key. These work just like the orange function keys on a Beeb.

FUNC in combination with a letter key produces single keystroke Basic keywords - a rather superfluous but non-compulsory way to enter programs. SHIFT-FUNC is a CAPS LOCK and controls a yellow LED buried out-of-sight on the left of the keys. The BBC's awkward SHIFT LOCK has been sensibly forgotten about.

All the usual Acorn keys are there - BREAK, ESCAPE, COPY, DELETE and the four arrows. Acorn has missed a good chance to do a proper cursor cluster, leaving the arrows in an awkward square. Five of the keys are shared by three characters. SHIFT and CTRL select the top two characters - a simple system.

The Electron drives an ordinary TV or an RGB or composite video monitor. The TV picture is, as the BBC, plain remarkable. Even 80 column text is readable. Unfortunately, the review machine consistently lost the top line of text. And of course, *TV doesn't work. It's also worth moaning that the composite video output is still black and white only.

The Electron supports BBC Modes 0 to 6. These provide a variety of screen formats to allow the programmer to choose between having lots of text, graphics and colours and not using up the memory. The above table lists the choices available. The speed column gives an idea of the relative speeds of each mode.

The Electron looks pretty impressive compared to its rivals. An 80 column, 640x256 display is unrivalled by every machine up to the BBC Model B itself. If you're into serious display work, the Electron is the obvious choice, although its eight colours are a bit limiting. But don't be taken in by the numbers. Resolution isn't everything - and machines such as the Atari offer fabulous colours and sprites to provide dramatic graphics. The problem is that the displays are taken from user RAM. At most the Electron has 21K free. At worst, you're down to 12K.

The Electron really suffers from not having a BBC style Mode 7. This is a teletext-style display that uses up a mere 1K of memory. So not only is 21K a bit of a restriction, there are also hundreds of BBC programs that will have to be modified to work on the Electron.

Keeping costs down is obviously important with the Electron, and leaving out a teletext generator was an unfortunate sacrifice. And it's a shame that Acorn hasn't included a software simulation of a teletext screen purely for compatibility purposes. It would be awfully slow and take up piles of memory, but it seems a lazy omission.

For now, storage is provided for using the BBC's reliable cassette system. There are no problems here - it always has been a superb system. Discs will no doubt be available later on, though you're going to need some add-ons - space for a DFS chip and disc interface as well as the drive itself.

This is the other sore point. All the Electron has is an edge connector. This is somewhat more complex than those used on Commodores and Sinclairs simply because of the timing involved. Acorn itself describes interfacing as a 'non-trivial job'.

This leaves buyers at the mercy of Acorn's delivery schedules for add-ons. Acorn is promising stuff to take the Electron up to and beyond the BBC, probably in both price and spec. First off will be a box allowing further ROM application programs to be plugged in.

Screw fixings underneath the Electron suggest that it could be a big box. But the real shame about the Electron is that you are going to need to pay extra for interfaces.

As it stands, the Electron is ruined by the lack of a printer port. Many will view it as a games machine, for which joystick ports would be a good idea. It may not matter to people who can only just afford the machine and don't want to buy a printer. But the Electron is a serious little machine and people shouldn't have to pay extra to expand it.

The Electron (or Elk as the nickname goes) works like a slow BBC. Speeds can be up to around four times slower, though BBC Basic remains a fast little mover. Relative to the competition, the Electron is delightfully quick. Graphic games in Basic are definitely possible.

Everything else relates to BBC MOS 1.0 (why not version 1.2?) and Basic 2. Acorn hasn't spent much time moving these across. Many of the commands and calls are simply switched off - the point being to maintain compatibility with BBC programs.

Take sound for example. The Electron doesn't have the three voice synth chip used on the Beeb. Instead it provides a single note channel, either of which can be on or off.

Sound is produced with the SOUND command though on the Electron, and channels 1, 2 and 3 all refer to the same channel.

Volume can still be set from 0 to -15, though the Electron takes 0 as off and anything else as maximum. The ENVELOPE command to shape the type of sounds produced still has 14 parameters. Only the first eight do anything, the last six being the dummies required for the BBC. Similar 'closed doors' greet anything that is in the BBC and not in the Electron.

The Electron has an incredible head start in life. BBC micro software is very patchy - some is bad, some is brilliant - but there is lots of it and it won't take much to move most programs over to the Electron. So Acorn has made a very clever move going for a clipped-wing BBC.

Unfortunately, the Electron's hardware will restrict the more serious side of software for a few months to come. Not having a printer interface rules out a cheap word processor, for example. So expect the Electron to grow up as a games machine.

Acorn has an undoubted winner. The Electron isn't quite as simple as a half priced BBC, but it does bring you amazing graphics and one of the fastest and most capable Basics in the business. It's easy to use, and easy to learn. Only the lack of built-in interfacing and technical information spoil the Electron's image. For a while the price will be a stumbling block, but I suspect that it could be lowered to £150 if need be.

Max Phillips