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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but outside the UK the Beeb and Acorn were very obscure. Sinclair and Amstrad had some degree of recognition outside the UK, but Acorn was pretty much entirely UK specific.

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Not just the UK. I remember in the mid 80s friends having Electron, and them being sold at the village show in very, very rural NZ.

NL:

In 1986 my school had a classroom fitted with a dozen BBC B's and a server with the co-processor.

Later that year Acorn dumped the Electrons and I was able to get a computer for a reasonable price.

Electron User ( was that the name? ) was available at our kiosks.

Interestingly when I researched the Acorn Atom (very simple 6502-based home computer from the early 80's) for an emulator, I found a very active Dutch community which helped me out with some questions I had. But AFAIK the Netherlands seemed to be the only '8-bit Acorn enclave' outside the UK, in other European countries Acorn only became somewhat popular with the Archimedes 3000 which was marketed as an "Amiga killer".

I've seen them in Germany, Belgium, France, and those were the only countries I had regular access to at the time besides Poland where I never saw any western machines other than an Atari 520 and the occasional whitebox IBM PC clone.

And there still is a pretty active BBC Micro/Master/Archimedes user group even today.

From Ireland, and used them (a3020) extensively in primary school

I am a retrocomputing enthusiast and I wonder where did they all go.

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