Missed call Whatever happened to the Acorn Communicator?

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

- David Crookes

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.