Acorn System 1: It must be love (aka HOW MUCH!!?)

[linker3000]

Someone's just bought the top half (keyboard, display and cassette interface) of an Acorn System 1 for an astounding £511:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/162185542432? ... EBIDX%3AIT

When I saw the listing appear, I stuck in a max bid of £15 thinking it would do as a spare part for mine.

The final selling price made me think for a moment what my intact, fully working one was worth - then I realized I wouldn't part with it anyway!

The System 1 was the first computer I saw and learned to use back in 1979 when I was 14 years old and in secondary school; all courtesy of a physics teacher with a passion for electronics and computing. I'm now 50 years old and still tinkering...and if you know of my other thread on the System 1 (viewtopic.php?f=12&t=3286&hilit=acorn+system+1), yes I will get around to building my replica one day - it's a shelved project at the moment.

I'd love to know how many working System 1's are still out there!

[BigEd]

Might get some info from the Stardot readership - I've posted a query.

I remember the adverts from back in the day - quite a tempting machine, comparable to the likes of the KIM-1 and AIM-65.

[linker3000]

> Might get some info from the Stardot readership

Thanks.

I registered there in July 2015 but no-one activated my account! I've just registered again.

I see the post over there is getting a bit of general feedback, but nothing specific about numbers of units. I know there's one at The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, one at Bletchley, mine, plus it's possible Mike Cowlishaw (Speleotrove) has one.

Anyway, I'm not going to lose any sleep over this, but it would be interesting to know.

[BigEd]

There was for a long time a blockage in the account approval process - I think it's been fixed now, and there are now more moderators too. (These might be related.)

I would guess the number sold would be in the low thousands. I'd like to think one or two places might still be using one for instrumentation or automation. But we're not likely to hear about it. As to how many collectors might have, I don't know - perhaps no more than a hundred? I'm making all these numbers up!

[BigEd]

Just a hint on the subject of how many might have been sold, note that the System was followed by the Atom which was to be followed by the Proton, which instead became the Beeb. Steve Furber talks about early 1981:

Quote:

Furber: I had the beginnings of a schematic at the beginning of the week, and I detailed the schematic.
We then got some help in to wire up the prototype, and then I was involved with Sophie in debugging the hardware and the software together, which finally came into life at about seven o’clock on the Friday morning with the BBC arriving at ten o’clock. I was still a research fellow, and aerodynamics was still my day job. That BBC Micro contract rush rather took over for a days, and Acorn got the contract. The BBC were confident that with the support of their TV program that Acorn would be able to sell 12,000 of these machines, which was quite a big number for Acorn - that was a business worth going for. Of course, it turned out to be a hopeless underestimate. Eventually about 1.5 million BBC Micros were sold.

- Steve Furber at http://archive.computerhistory.org/reso ... 01-acc.pdf

So, 12000 units was quite a big number: that puts a ceiling on Atom sales and System sales, I think.

Edit: but, see this comment

Quote:

the BBC was confident that their programme would cause the order of 12,000 machines to be sold, okay, so 12,000 was enough for Acorn to pay serious attention to. I mean, I’m sure we’d sold more than 12,000 Atoms but it’s still a big increment to the business

[BigEd]

A bit more support for the order of magnitude of production at the time of the System:

Quote:

I think before the late ‘70s it was simply too expensive. You know, buying a computer was as expensive as buying a car, if not buying a house. And so you’d have to have a really serious use to spend that sort of money. But by the late 70s it was clearly possible to build computers, you know, that cost more like the price of a piece of hi-fi than the price of a car. So that is game changing, I think. I mean, we had no idea of the scale of the game change. I think we probably still felt that computers were for people like us, right, enthusiasts, hobbyists, people who were interested in computers for their own sake and therefore the market of such people is quite small. You know, people who’d be prepared to solder things together to connect them or write assembly code or so on. So we saw, if you like, a sort of growing hobby market and also we saw that these cheap products then gained use in places like university labs and, you know – I’m not sure we’d quite seen the way into schools at that point. So you could see markets of, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of parts. We’d – I don’t think anybody really saw the consumer boom, this sort of computer in every house scenario.

- Steve Furber in another oral history.

Edit: also, p117,

Quote:

the Atom had sold in many tens of thousands

[GARTHWILSON]

Remember the line in the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" where the executive, puzzled and tapping his pencil on the desk, said slowly, "What would the common man want with a computer?" (They must have had some good laughs making the movie.)