Acorn Communicator

The Acorn Communicator is a business computer developed by Acorn Computers in 1985. The system sold in very low numbers to companies requiring a computer with a built-in modem. As a dedicated Prestel terminal with built-in word processing and spreadsheet capabilities, the Communicator found a niche market amongst travel agents in the United Kingdom and Italy, who used Prestel (and similar networks) as probably the earliest online booking service.

The machine used the Ferranti-manufactured "Aberdeen" gate array developed for the Electron, which was the largest ULA ever developed at that time.

The system used a 16-bit Western Design Center 65816 chip rather than the 8-bit MOS Technology 6502, which was used by all of Acorn's previous offerings. The communicator boasted 512 kB of memory, which was expandable to 1024 kB.

The Communicator contained a full office software suite, including View (word processor), ViewSheet (spreadsheet), and a fully-featured Prestel terminal, plus (of course) Econet and many of the interfaces found on the BBC series of computers. The system software that bound the packages together was a mixture of BBC Basic and assembler. The software development team was led by Paul Bond, a keen pilot who would occasionally fly team members in his Cessna when things were quiet.

First versions of the Communicator were monochrome-only; later (but before first customer delivery), a daughterboard provided full colour.

External links

* [http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/Communicator.html Chris’s Acorns: Communicator]
* [http://web.archive.org/web/20041030195048/http://www.aceadvanced.org/computers/acorn/comunicator.htm Archive of page dedicated to the Communicator]
* [http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/cgi-bin/sitewise.pl?act=det&p=1327 The Very Rare Acorn Briefcase Communicator @ Computing History]

* [http://freewebs.com./g3xtreme]