[1] The Electron is able to save and load programs onto audio cassette via a cable, originally supplied with the computer, connecting it to any standard tape recorder with the appropriate sockets.

[5] For a short period, the Electron was reportedly the best selling micro in the United Kingdom,[6] with an estimated 200,000[7] to 250,000 machines[8] sold over its entire commercial lifespan.

[12] Acorn co-founder Chris Curry also emphasised the Electron's role as being "designed to compete with the Spectrum... to get the starting price very low, but not preclude expansion in the long term.

[14] The price at launch – £199 – remained unchanged from that stated in an announcement earlier in the year, with the machine's nickname within Acorn – the "Elk" – also being reported publicly for perhaps the first time.

[34] Production difficulties at Astec in Malaysia delayed the machine's introduction, forcing Acorn to look to other manufacturers such as AB Electronics in Wales and Wongs in Hong Kong (an original equipment manufacturer making over 30 million circuit boards a year, along with power supplies and plastic housings, for companies such as IBM, Xerox, Atari, and Apple, including units made for Acorn for the BBC Micro[35]).

[8] A more substantial emphasis on the "home, music and hobby sectors" came with the appointment of a dedicated marketing manager in 1989 following the launch of the BBC A3000 in the Acorn Archimedes range.

The Electron was said to be particularly suitable for deployment in this application in that it had a "large expansion bus",[75] ostensibly making the machine amenable to the necessary adaptations required for the role, together with its "price, and the fact it has a real keyboard".

[77] The adoption of an Acorn product in this role was perhaps also unusual in that much of BT's Merlin range of this era had been supplied by ICL, notably the M2226 small business computer and M3300 "communicating word processor".

[61] Various applications in Acornsoft's View suite, together with the languages COMAL, Logo and ISO Pascal, were reported as being compatible with the Electron, as were some titles from BBC Soft and other developers.

Turtle Graphics was a cassette-based product, available alongside Forth, Lisp and S-Pascal amongst the first titles released for the Electron,[104] featuring a subset of Logo focused on the interactive aspects of the language.

[105] Acornsoft Logo was provided on ROM cartridge and offered a vocabulary of over 200 commands as part of a more comprehensive implementation of the language, exposing its list processing foundations.

In early 1985, the View word processor and ViewSheet spreadsheet applications, familiar from the BBC Micro, were released on ROM cartridge for use with the Electron expanded with a Plus 1, priced at £49.50 each.

[108] Acornsoft did not release its ViewStore database program specifically for the Electron, but the software was reported as being compatible, albeit with function key combinations different to those documented for the BBC Micro.

[118] Competing with these products but requiring only a disc system, AVP's Pixel Perfect offered a rudimentary desktop publishing solution, utilising the computer's high-resolution Mode 0 display.

[11]: 11 [note 3] Other games would simply load non-graphical data into the display and leave it visible as regions of apparently randomly coloured pixels.

Although programs can alter the position of the screen in memory, the non-linear format of the display means that vertical scrolling can only be done in blocks of 8 pixels without further work.

Firetrack, released on a compilation by Superior Software,[132] exploits a division in the way the Electron handles its display – of the seven available graphics modes, two are configured so that the final two of every ten scanlines are blank and are not based on the contents of RAM.

But if set to a frequency outside the human audible range then the ear can't perceive the square wave, only the difference between the speaker being switched on and off.

Smiths, Boots, Comet and hundreds of independent computer dealers,[citation needed] selling as many as 23,000 units over a two-year period, helped by a bundling agreement with Dixons.

Installation of the AP6 unit required some modifications to the Plus 1, undertaken either by the user or by PRES, and the product could also be enhanced with the Advanced Plus 7 offering battery-backed RAM support for two 16 KB banks.

The Plus 1 needed memory page &D for its workspace, and the unit added some processing overhead when enabled, both of these things causing issues with the loading and running of software, particularly cassette-based games.

[159] One review reported that the Cumana Electron Filing System cartridge had an edge connector that would not physically fit inside the slot in the Rombox Plus unit; this along with a perceived lack of robustness of the case being their only major reservations about the product.

[161] One application of the user port was to connect a mouse, utilised by Slogger's version of the Stop Press desktop publishing package by Advanced Memory Systems.

Various board upgrade options were also offered between the variants, with the product being described mainly as a vehicle to expose the bundled software packages to as many as 150,000 owners of the estimated 200,000 Electrons in the UK who "have not yet been able to acquire or use View or Viewsheet".

[198] In mid-1985, Solidisk released a cartridge-based interface with support for single and double density storage and providing Acorn DFS and ADFS compatibility, 16 KB of on-board sideways RAM, and a connector for a Winchester hard drive.

[citation needed] Speeding up the low portion of memory is particularly useful on 6502 derived machines because that processor has a faster addressing for the first 256 bytes and so it is common for software to put any variables involved in time-critical sections of program into that region.

[212] By providing extra storage this modification also allowed some games and applications intended for the BBC Micro to function on the Electron despite the lack of a native Mode 7.

Although cheap and effective in enabling use of some software that only used official operating system routines for text output, this solution proved very slow because the Electron had to be placed into the high-bandwidth Mode 2 display to be able to show eight colours at once.

[221] A conceptually similar predecessor to the software-based simulator was published by Electron User in early 1987, offering a monochrome Mode 4 simulation of the Teletext display, using the lower 25 character lines of the screen to show the Teletext output, reserving several lines at the top of the screen for a representation of Mode 7 used to prepare the eventual visual output.

[223]: 3–4 However, with users increasingly able to rely on expansions such as the Slogger Master RAM board to provide more memory, and with this combination of expansions acknowledged throughout the user manual, the emphasis of the Mode 7 Simulator and Mark 2 Display Unit was arguably to deliver the actual display capabilities for those applications that needed them, instead of using Mode 7 as a way of economising with regard to memory usage, and to do so at a reasonable price.