This Atom, according to Chris Turner, is in a black pre-production case as they would use any colour plastic that happened to be in the Hoppers to test the quality of the moulds.

This Acorn Atom has found itself with an issue 5 mainboard installed at some point, probably put in this black case as it was spare at the time, and would have stood out if it was being used for any special project.

The Acorn Atom was introduced in 1980 as a low-cost modular and expandable system. It was based on the System Three. It was housed in a moulded plastic case with a full-sized keyboard and audio cassette interface. It was available as either a kit or ready-built. After its release in 1980 the 2K RAM, 8K ROM model was available as a kit for £120 +VAT or £150 +VAT ready-built.

The Atom is built around the 6502 microprocessor, which ran at 1MHz. The base system had 2K RAM and 8K ROM, but each could be expanded to 12K. A floating-point ROM extension was also available.

The successor to the Atom was known as the Proton during the development stage, which became the BBC Micro following the BBC's Computer Literacy Project.

Manufacturer: Acorn
Date: January 1980

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH530. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.