Introducing Acorn: A professional MPU card

This is probably Acorn's very first advert - it does indeed say "introducing Acorn" - and appeared just a few months after the company's founding as Cambridge Processor Unit (CPU) in November 1978.

The company was founded by Chris Curry - previously of Sinclair Radionics - and Hermann Hauser, with some assistance from Andy Hopper of Orbis Limited.

Orbis was a company Hopper had already co-founded with Hauser - whom he met at a Darwin College disco - in order to sell Maurice Wilkes' Cambridge Ring network. Orbis would itself would become a division of Acorn in 1979[source: https://archivesit.org.uk/interviews/andrew-andy-hopper/].

Meanwhile, CPU had originally started out as a consultancy - a choice possibly influenced by the success of fellow Cantabrigians Cambridge Consultants Ltd - with its first project being for Ace Coin Equipment (ACE), a coin-operated gaming machine supplier based in Mid Glamorgan, Wales.

[extra: Ace3210_Contact_1978.webp|An ACE 3210 fruit machine, probably using CPU's microprocessor controller. From Contact, 1978|200|right]The contract was to help ACE transition from its older electro-mechanical machines over to microprocessor-operated systems, which could be easily reprogrammed for different games, thus significantly extending the life of the hardware. 

Steve Furber worked on the initial processing hardware, using National Semiconductors' SC/MP "Scamp" processors, with much of the rest of the gaming hardware created by Chris Turner. 

Sophie Wilson also contributed some anti-radio-interference circuitry, which apparently prevented the machine from crashing and paying out too much money[source: Chris Turner's Memoir, circa 1979. Museum of Computing History, https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/66053/It-s-all-in-the-Game-(CPU-Ltd)/].

The gaming controller hardware was assembled onto readily-available double-height Eurocard modules, and it didn't take long before what was already a fairly general-purpose controller naturally evolved into CPU's first home-grown hardware product - the Acorn-branded professional MPU card, later called the Acorn Controller. 

This was - unsurprisingly - also a "general purpose industrial controller" in a Eurocard format, with perhaps the only significant change that it was now running MOS Technology's 6502 CPU - the same CPU used in the contemporary [#PET|Commodore PET], [#Apple II] and [#Microtan 65], among others.

However, the advert also mentions that by adding a Eurocard hexadecimal keyboard and a cassette-tape interface to the Acorn, it was possible to create the Acorn Microcomputer, which was essentially a stand-alone microcomputer, albeit one without a case. 

The controller along with the Acorn Microcomputer - which would become known as the System 1 - plus various memory modules, VDU cards and ROM software cards, remained as Acorn's bread-and-butter until the company's breakthrough [#Atom] in the spring of 1980, which was about when the original ACE project was wound up.

The complete micro was available as a kit for £70.20, or ready-assembled for £81, which is about [[81|1979]] in [[now]].


