Richard Hallas : Thank you very much! And again many thanks for your post with many background information to the topic. 
Your posts here in the thread are also significantly "guilty" that I deal more closely with the BBC BASIC of the 8bit generation. As written here before, my first contact with BBC BASIC was an used Acorn Archimedes 3000, which is still here. But I had nothing to do with BBC 8bit computers until recently.
Thank you for the nice feedback! It's nice to know that you've enjoyed what I've had to say, and that you've found it interesting, useful, inspirational or whatever. Indeed, I'm delighted to have enthused you sufficiently to actually buy an Electron!
I had a lot to do with UK computers (besides the C64) in the 1980s (Sinclair ZX80, ZX81, Spectrum and QL, Memotech MTX512 and Enterprise 128), but never a BBC computer from Acorn.
Wow! That's some great experience with some interesting machines!
I personally owned a ZX81 and a Spectrum (well, both a 48K Spectrum and later a Spectrum 128) in addition to my BBC Model B (later Master 128). And I started out on a borrowed PET 2001 Series, and later had access to a Commodore Plus/4. I loved the Sinclair machines in particular (the Spectrum was fantastic in so many ways) but the best-designed of all those systems was the BBC, despite its relatively limited capabilities in some ways (only 8 colours and far too little memory).
I've still never actually seen a ZX80 in person, and I never used a QL, so I missed out on those early and late Sinclair machines.
As for the Memotech MTX512… oh, I'd have loved one of those! What a great computer it appeared to be: incredibly stylish in its aluminium case, and pretty powerful and interesting – like the BBC Micro, its BASIC had an inbuilt assembler, I believe. It was destined to be a really good, successful machine, but then some huge deal with Russia fell through and bankrupted the company, which was a tragedy. It's probably the most regrettable computer company failure of the 80s. Memotech had a good reputation and – as you probably know – originally made its name as a manufacturer of interesting and good quality peripherals for the Sinclair ZX81. I actually had a Memotech 16K RAM pack for mine.
As for the Elan Enterprise… that too looked as though it was going to be a really interesting machine, but it came out too late and never really took off. I'd have liked one, but I don't think there was really any software for it. It may possibly have been more popular in Europe than it was in the UK; interestingly, I've noticed quite a number of 'new' Enterprises on eBay recently, and they all seem to have European keyboards (AZERTY rather than QWERTY).
The more astonished I was and am, how good and well thought out these computers were at that time. You can see a coherent concept of hardware and software. Basically the opposite of the approach of Commodore. 
Alone before the BBC BASIC 2, I really take off my hat! What here - also "under the surface" - of really good thoughts are in it, all my greatest respect! I prefer to spare myself a comparison with BASIC 2 from the C64. 
As a teenager I probably wouldn't have been able to appreciate it that much. Topics like "Who can I trade games with for this?" and similar thoughts had priority. But nowadays, looking back, I can only say "Wow!". Some people at Acorn really put a lot of thought into this!
Yes, I agree: nowadays, having grown up and gained both experience and the benefit of hindsight, it's now much easier to judge these old machines on their merits and appreciate what an amazing job Acorn actually did. Back in the 80s we'd have been much more interested in the games catalogues for the relative machines, and so the Electron would have been dismissed very quickly when compared to both the Spectrum and the Commodore 64 in particular. But now that our perspectives have changed, we can make a better judgement about the machines on their own merits.
I like all the platforms – don't get me wrong, I don't mean to bash anyone here – and they all had their good and bad points. But I really feel that it boils down to this:
• Acorn (notably the BBC Micro): absolutely BY FAR AND AWAY the best company of the lot in terms of the underlying quality of their designs, for both hardware and software. Yes, they made mistakes and had weak areas (as did everyone else!), and the whole Acorn 8-bit range was crippled by having insufficient memory and very outdated-looking graphics capabilities, but the hardware and software were both exceptionally well thought out and forward-thinking. This is easily proven when you consider the very considerable extent to which Acorn's later 32-bit ARM-based machines are very much successors to the 8-bit designs. They're vastly more capable and powerful, but the modular, extensible approach (in both hardware and software), the backwards compatibility, the extension of existing concepts (e.g. the screen mode system) make them very much a development of the family that really started with the BBC. And although Acorn's 32-bit machines never really achieved much success beyond the UK education market, that's not representative of their quality. In reality, if we lived in a fairer world, they should have taken over and become the standard (rather than the PC), because they were just incomparably better than anything else (PC, Mac) for well over a decade.
• Commodore (notably the C64): Commodore was unlike the other companies because it had been around for a long time (the PET was really the first ever 'proper' personal computer to be released) and it had a lot of experience in business and education around the world, not just the home market. So it had lots of people to sell to and experience in doing so, globally. And there was a lot to like about Commodore machines… but also, a lot not to like, unfortunately. The C64 was designed much more as a games machine than most others, with its very advanced sound chip, extensive (if dull) colour palette, sprites etc. and a cartridge slot. It's easy to see why it was popular and long-lived. Yet it had an appalling version of BASIC (sorry, but it's true) that was easily the worst on the market and made it a rotten choice of machine for learning programming. And the stand-out peripherals for being awful were the ones you needed to save and load programs, which is mind-blowing when you think about it. On the one hand, you had no option but to buy Commodore's Datasette and/or 1541 disk drive; unlike the other machines you couldn't use a regular tape recorder or enjoy a choice of affordable third party disk drives (which was particularly true on the BBC). Then, the tape machine was an unbelievably slow 60 baud (is that REALLY true…? I read it recently) – and the 1541 disk drive made continental drift look fast. The 1541 was, I believe, only a 300 baud device. That made it FIVE TIMES SLOWER than the ZX Spectrum's TAPE interface! It's remarkable to me that the Commodore 64 managed to be successful in spite of such awful storage options. And that Commodore didn't do a more competent job with them in the first place.
• Sinclair (notably the Spectrum): Sinclair was the absolute master of compromise. Every possible corner was cut in the quest to produce a computer as cheaply as possible. And yet… and yet… just look at the fantastic final result. The Spectrum was really great. It was indeed cheap, but it wasn't nasty. It may not have been as deeply thought through as Acorn's machines, but it was certainly well conceived. It was well designed and manufactured, it came with an outstandingly good manual that taught you how to program in BASIC (also true of the BBC), and its version of BASIC was also excellent. It was a decently fast machine, especially given that it had no graphics/sound support chips, so the processor had to do everything. Its screen was a genius design that allowed you to use the machine's full resolution and all 16 colours freely at the same time, and yet took less than 7K of RAM out of a total of 42K available. (Compare with the BBC: to get full colour you had to use a 20K low-resolution screen mode on a machine with much less than 32K of available RAM.) The compromise was mixing pixel-level monochrome bitmap graphics with character-level colouring… but it was a GOOD compromise that gave the machine a lot of its individuality, and overall it was more a benefit than a hindrance. Oh, and the Spectrum had the best, most reliable and fastest tape interface of any 8-bit computer: 1500 baud. (Even the BBC only did 1200.) In terms of overall capability, value and performance, I firmly believe the Spectrum was the best 8-bit computer on the market in the UK.
So: Commodore for home users who cared more about games than learning to program. Sinclair for the budget-conscious who wanted a great all-round machine that could tackle anything. And Acorn for the better-off people who wanted the best machine in terms of learning what computers are (or should be) all about, and/or who wanted to do advanced projects that interfaced with other things, including custom hardware and electronics projects. All three platforms were good general computers, of course, but the BBC was certainly the best designed overall. And oddly enough, although the C64 was the best for games on paper, I think it's fair to say that the Spectrum ended up with the best overall games catalogue, both for quantity and quality, in spite of the machine's apparent technical limitations. I do suspect that that has a lot to do with (a) its affordability and (b) its accessibility to amateur programmers, who went on to become really good.
Anyway, the BBC was a bit too expensive for a lot of people to afford (and they tended to get Spectrums instead), whilst the Electron was a bit too little, a bit too late. Nevertheless, the BBC was so widespread in schools in particular that a lot of kids did indeed learn to program very well on it, and in fact many of the software releases that came out for it were written by school children who'd learnt on the machine itself. It was certainly a fantastic machine for learning about computers, not least because, on the one hand, it was so extremely well designed and, on the other hand, there was a vast amount of excellent technical documentation for it.
The keyboard of the Electron is really good for that time and it even offers 80 characters per line (mode 0). I dreamed of this when working on the Spectrum 48k.
Yes. Again, the Spectrum's screen was a brilliant compromise in lots of ways. Although it does seem on the small side now (32x24 characters, 256x192 pixels), it was a decent size for its day and big enough to be genuinely useful, and bigger than the compromised screens of other machines. The VIC-20 (which was a Spectrum competitor in its early days) had only 22 characters per line, and that really wasn't enough. The BBC Micro and Electron had graphical modes (especially the full 16-colour mode) that only displayed 20 characters per line, which I personally hated… but at least they also had restricted-colour 40-column modes and monochrome 80-column modes. (Plus, on the BBC, the very efficient 1K Teletext mode, which had some aspects in common with the Spectrum's screen.) The original Spectrum offered just the standard screen mode and no other alternatives (though, interestingly, the unsuccessful US Timex Sinclair variants did offer high-res modes as well… and these have survived in some later clones, such as – I think! – the Spectrum Next, which also offers various other new screen options, including much higher resolutions and far more colours, without the character-resolution restriction of old).
So, the Electron certainly had some useful potential for word processing and other serious software, with its 80-column screen modes. Indeed, if you got the Plus 1 expansion, you could get cartridges containing VIEW and ViewSheet, the leading word processor and spreadsheet for the Acorn range. These really were superb for the time, and eventually developed into a combined, integrated program called PipeDream. This was launched on the Cambridge Z88 portable machine – a MOST interesting computer. It was the last machine that Sinclair produced, after he'd sold his name to Amstrad. (Otherwise I suppose it'd have been the Sinclair ZX88.) That was actually a really good machine and quite remarkable in many ways, because it was almost half Sinclair, half Acorn. Although it was Sinclair's product and (like the Spectrum) based on the Z80 processor, it had PipeDream as its integrated software – and PipeDream was the direct successor to View Professional, which was the all-in-one suite that VIEW, ViewSheet and ViewStore (database) etc. had developed into, and which was available on the BBC series. Moreover, after the Z88, PipeDream was launched for the Acorn 32-bit RISC OS machines and became a 'killer app' on that platform for many years. I think a Windows version may also have appeared; I'm not sure as I'm not an MS Windows fan. Anyway, PipeDream first appeared under that name on the Z88, which made the machine of considerable interest to Acorn users. Moreover, the Z88 also came with BBC BASIC built in! So, again, it seemed almost more like an Acorn machine than a Sinclair one.
So thanks again for your great posts on this. I always enjoy reading them and take a lot from them on the subject. And who knows, maybe it really wasn't the last 8bit BBC acquisition I made. I find this topic exciting and interesting in any case. Many thanks for your great input!
Well, thanks again for your kind words. I'm pleased to have made some kind of positive contribution, if only a minor one! 
It's a pleasure to reminisce, actually. I know the relevance to Commodore is a bit tenuous at this point, but we're all simply fans of old computers at heart, aren't we?!
Anyway, enjoy your Electron… and if you ever get the chance to acquire a BBC Master, jump at it! If you like the Electron, you'll absolutely love the Master…
