As a home system, the BBC also fostered a community of enthusiasts who benefited from its flexible architecture, which supported everything from disk interfaces to speech synthesis.

This work influenced the rapid evolution of RISC-based processing in mobile devices, embedded systems, and beyond, making the BBC Micro an important stepping stone in computing.

[1] The project was initiated partly in response to an ITV documentary series The Mighty Micro, in which Christopher Evans of the UK's National Physical Laboratory predicted the coming microcomputer revolution and its effect on the economy, industry, and lifestyle of the United Kingdom.

[7] As a concession to the BBC's expectation of "industry standard" compatibility with CP/M, apparently under the direction of John Coll, the Tube interface was incorporated into the design, enabling a Z80 second processor to be added.

[16] Acorn's strategy in the US focused on the education market, worth a reported $700 million, by offering the BBC Micro in an upgraded form of the Model B with an expanded ROM, speech synthesis hardware, and built-in Econet interface for a price of $995, complementing this with the provision of software and materials designed to support teaching and to encourage adoption by teachers "fearful" of computers or skeptical of the role of computers in the curriculum.

[19] Another deployment in Phoenix, Arizona valued at $174,697 saw 175 BBC Micros installed, with the local Acorn dealer predicting sales worth $2 million in the next two years, of which around 85 to 90 percent would be made into education, the remainder going to the small business market.

[21] In October 1984, while preparing a major expansion of its US dealer network, Acorn claimed sales of 85 per cent of the computers in British schools, and delivery of 40,000 machines per month.

[35] Ultimately, upon Acorn's withdrawal from the US in 1986, Datum would continue manufacturing at a level of 7000 to 8000 Spanish-language machines per year for the North and South American markets.

[43] Despite denials of involvement with ITV from Prism Microproducts, the company had already been pursuing a joint venture with Transam on a product rumoured to be under consideration by the broadcasting group.

[44] This product, a business system subsequently known as the Wren,[45] had reportedly been positioned as such an "ITV Micro" towards the end of 1983, also to be offered in a home variant with ORACLE teletext reception capabilities.

Some machines of the era accept the inherent performance hit, as was the case for the Amstrad CPC, Atari 8-bit computers, and to a lesser extent the ZX Spectrum.

Acorn put a resistor pack across the data bus, which Furber described as "'the engineer's finger' and again, we have no idea why it's necessary, and a million and a half machines later it's still working, so nobody asked any questions".

The separate RGB video out socket was an engineering requirement from the BBC to allow the machine to directly output a broadcast quality signal for use within television programming; it was used on episodes of The Computer Programme and Making the Most of the Micro.

The Tube was used for third-party add-ons, including a Z80 board and hard disk drive from Torch that allowed the BBC machine to run CP/M programs.

[51] Among the software that operated on the Tube are an enhanced version of the Elite video game and a computer-aided design system that required a second 6502 CPU and a 3-dimensional joystick named a "Bitstik"[1].

Users wishing to operate Model B software need to add the extra RAM and the user/printer MOS Technology 6522 VIA (which many games use for timers) and snip a link, a task that can be achieved without soldering.

[58] US models include the BASIC III ROM chip, modified to accept the American spelling of COLOR, but the height of the graphics display was reduced to 200 scan lines to suit NTSC TVs,[59] severely affecting applications written for British computers.

This had a modest market impact and received a rather unsympathetic reception, with one reviewer's assessment being that the machine was "18 months too late" and that it "must be seen as a stop gap",[63] and others criticising the elevated price of £500 (compared to the £400 of the original Model B) in the face of significantly cheaper competition providing as much or even twice as much memory.

[72] Features specific to some versions of BASIC, like vector graphics, keyboard macros, cursor-based editing, sound queues, and envelopes, are in the MOS ROM and made available to any application.

The Acorn Graphics Extension ROM (GXR) expands the VDU routines to draw geometric shapes, flood fills, and sprites.

During 1985, Micro Power designed and marketed a Basic Extension ROM,[73] introducing statements such as WHILE, ENDWHILE, CASE, WHEN, OTHERWISE, ENDCASE, and direct mode commands including VERIFY.

Published programs largely conform to the API except for games, which routinely engage with the hardware for greater speed, and require a particular Acorn model.

Support for various peripherals and accessories was advertised, floor turtles having particular significance, but hardware extensions offering sprite capabilities were also developed for use with certain implementations, notably Logotron Logo.

Furber composed a reference model of the processor on the BBC Micro with 808 lines of BASIC, and Arm Ltd. retains copies of the code for intellectual property purposes.

They still survive in a few interactive displays in museums across the United Kingdom, and the Jodrell Bank observatory was reported using a BBC Micro to steer its 42 ft radio telescope in 2004.

[93] Furber said that although "the [engineering] margins on the Beeb were very, very small", when he asked BBC owners at a retrocomputing meeting what components had failed after 30 years, they said "you have to replace the capacitors in the power supply but everything else still works".

[100][101] Like the IBM PC with the contemporary Color Graphics Adapter, the video output of the BBC Micro could be switched by software between a number of display modes.

The BBC B+ and the later Master provided 'shadow modes', where the 1–20 KB frame buffer was stored in an alternative RAM bank, freeing the main memory for user programs.

The original plan was that some games would be released on cartridges, but due to the limited sales of the speech upgrade combined with economic and other viability concerns,[108] little or no software was ever produced for these sockets.

[110] Black Uhuru used the Envelope Generator from SYSTEM software (Sheffield) running on a BBC Micro, to create some of the electro-dub sounds on Try It (Anthem album 1983).