Item ST 43168 Personal Computer - Acorn, BBC Microcomputer #100002, Dec 1981

Summary

BBC Microcomputer Serial number #100002 manufactured by Acorn and built in December 1981. It was popularly known as the BBC Micro or the Beeb, it is sometimes incorrectly called the "Proton", which was the codename of a proof-of-concept development (designed and built at 4A Market Hill, Cambridge in the first four days of February 1981). The design combines many firsts including local area networking, high resolution graphics (when most computers were still monochrome), speech synthesis, and the ability to connect a second processor, which allowed other computer operating systems to run.

Serial number #100002 is historically significant, being the only example of the first batch of 10 hand-assembled machines known to exist (numbered #100000 to #100009). Acorn released this first issue board (along with the keyboard and case) to meet Barson's commitments to the Western Australian Department of Education. The power supply and disk interface arrived several weeks later, just in time for the WA school computer tender evaluation.

The '1' in the serial number refers to the production plant where the printed circuit board was produced - in this case: Cleartone in Wales. Cleartone produced 275 of the Issue 1 boards for development, of which only a few still exist.

The components on the main circuit board were populated by the donor at Acorn in Cambridge. It shows signs of the work done to bring this pre-production unit to life during debugging in the workshops at Barson Computers in Abbotsford, Victoria. This included extra piggybacked components, a handmade heatsink to allow a custom chip to cope with an Australian summer, and jumper wires.

As a result of Barson's initiatives, disk storage and local area networking were released in Australia well ahead of the UK. The BBC Micro was the first to be approved by all Australian State Education Departments for use in schools.

Physical Description

Rectangular beige coloured plastic computer case with dark grey coloured plastic QWERTY style keyboard and orange coloured plastic function keys and paper label above keyboard. White plastic mains cable attached at rear and loose black coloured plastic RGB cable (Red Green Blue) cable with male plugs for a colour monitor to be attached to the console. Electronic circutry inside case.