Econet was Acorn Computers's low-cost local area network system, based on a CSMA-CD serial protocol carried over a five-wire data bus, intended for use by schools and small businesses.

It was widely used in those areas, and was supported by a large number of different computer and server systems produced both by Acorn and by other companies.

[4][5] Also in that year the BBC Micro was released, initially with provision for floppy disc and Econet interface ports, but without the necessary supporting ICs fitted, optionally to be added in a post sale upgrade.

Acorn's Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry agreed to allow it to be also offered with Econet fitted, as they had previously done with the disc interface.

Barson's engineers applied a few modifications to fix bugs on the early BBC Micro motherboards, which were adopted by Acorn in later releases.

[17] Support for the Econet protocol and AUN was removed from the Linux kernel in 2012 from version 3.5, due to lack of use and privilege escalation vulnerabilities.

The machine-type codes which can be returned by that command[20][21] are a useful indication of the range of hardware that offered Econet as their primary networking function or as an option: The manual[21] includes an assembly language program to report a machine type, software version and release numbers.

There was also provision for promiscuous mode reception, termed wild receive in the PRM, requested by listening for station and network numbers both being zero.

Technical details of packets and frames, the Econet API, and worked examples in ARM assembler and BBC BASIC are given in the RISC OS Programmer's Reference Manual.

[27] At the time and in the markets for which Econet was developed, the main purpose of computer networking was to provide local area shared access to expensive hardware such as disc storage and printers.

The original file server was very basic, essentially allowing limited access to a floppy disc over the network.

So the servers available fell into roughly three categories:[28] The machine type numbers listed in the "Supported systems" section above are an indication of the range of hardware that was available or planned.

Short utilities such as network chat programs were often published in magazines or distributed by sharing among users; these made use of the Econet protocols to work alongside the basic file and print services.

[32] Acorn emphasised the Filestore in the late 1980s as a solution for small workgroups,[33] offering a base unit with optional hard disk storage modules.

This was intended for small networks, typically in an educational setting, to solve a narrowly defined problem of sharing what were at the time expensive peripherals.

[44] While Econet was essentially specific to the Acorn range of computers, it does share common concepts with modern network file systems and protocols: