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Missed call Whatever happened to the Acorn Communicator?
PC Pro
|December 2024
When Acorn launched its 16-bit Communicator computer with a built-in modem, it struggled to get potential buyers to listen, as David Crookes explains

A corn is best known for the BBC Micro, and for good reason. This iconic series of computers found a place in schools in the early 1980s as a way of teaching children how to code, and it was a key component for the BBC Computer Literacy Project.
But while Acorn grew during this period (its profits reaching £8.6 million in July 1983, having been just £3,000 four years earlier), the home computer market soon went through a turbulent time. As a consequence, having already sensed a need to turn things around, Acorn's co-founder Christopher Curry began looking to target business users with new machines and identified a potential gap in the market.
It led to the production of what was the only 16-bit machine that Acorn ever madea computer that barely anyone talks about today due to it being DEL CE AC Co E a failure. Yet it's still something of a curiosity some 30 years later, with people paying good money to grab one for themselves (one eBay auction actually fetched £2,250).
Ready to talk
News of Curry's machine emerged in 1984. In that December, Popular Computing Weekly mentioned the C30, a computer the journalist said would "probably use a 16-bit version of the BBC machine's 6502 processor".
A month later, Acorn User magazine revealed more information about the computer, suggesting it would come with a built-in telephone handset and rival ICL's One Per Desk - a hybrid computer and HOME INSERT % telecommunications terminal based on Sinclair QL hardware that was launched in 1984.
It was set to use the Western Design Center's (WDC) 16-bit 65C816 chip and be compatible with the BBC and Electron machines.
An adapter would allow it to use the teletext services Ceefax and Oracle, too.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der December 2024-Ausgabe von PC Pro.
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