Tony L
Administrator
Just been given a close to mint, boxed and seemingly perfectly functional Acorn Electron! An Elk! Very low use apparently, the original owner just didn’t get on with computers and its just sat in its box for decades. It really is a nice tidy one. It will be fun to play some old games (I’ve ordered a couple from eBay), reacquaint myself with BBC Basic etc. I’ve done nothing more than check the PSU voltage and look for leaky caps (none found) and run it for a couple of 20 minute stints so far. Much to my amazement its intro cassette loaded ok, and I also typed a 40 or so line program in from the hefty manual. All good, though looks a bit chunky on a 50” LCD TV (that thankfully has an RF input!)!
Never used an Elk before, though a friend had a BBC back in the early ‘80s so I took my first computing steps on that. I’ve a lot of time for the BBC Micro, it was a great bit of kit!
I’m pondering whether to recap it or not. It seems perfectly happy at this stage, and the ones in there are decent brands (Nippon-Chemi-Con, Nichicon etc). I know BBC Micro PSUs tend to fail, but I’ve not dug up much about the much smaller and simpler Elk. I’ll keep run time fairly short at this stage anyway in the hope what is there reforms and keep an eye for any issues.
Anyone else here into old computers, retro-gaming etc? What you got?
PS The new vintage rug might be a bit distracting as a photo background!