The Acorn Electron home computer was a cut down version of the popular BBC-Micro, manufactured by Acorn Computers and aimed at the home computer games market.

The Acorn Electron had 32K RAM but due to how this operated with the display, only 20K was available for programs and memory access was notably slow which meant a significant decrease in speed of programs written for the BBC-Micro.

The Electron had less I/O ports than the BBC-Micro, with just an interface to connect a tape deck and a TV out port!

Expansion packs were produced which connected to the rear of the Electron to provide ROM cartridge slots and disk access, as well as extra memory and the ability to run the BBC-Micro's display mode 7 (teletext).

British Telecom also released their own variant of the machine - the BT Merlin M2105 Communications Terminal. This consisted of a de-badged Electron plus a large expansion unit containing 32 KB of RAM, 48 KB of ROM, a Centronics printer port and a modem. The ROM firmware provided dial-up communications facilities.