Mannerisms

"We made our first £3,000 from doing consultancy work for a fruit machine company and, after we'd designed the Acorn System 1, we scraped together all the money we had and spent it on a full page advertisement for the System 1 in Practical Electronics - in total confidence that, the day after the ad came out, the cheques would roll in, and we would shovel them into the bank, and buy all the materials we needed to fulfil the orders. And it was no surprise to us that, next morning, these cheques came in piles. More than we'd ever thought," recalls Hauser.

"We were just selling kits, bare boards for these microprocessor hobby guys - the 'enthuserasts'  we used to call them. But Chris (Curry) had this great marketing idea that if the System 1 had a nice case, it would have market appeal", recounts Hauser, "so we were the first people to advertise a thing called the Acorn Atom with a proper keyboard built into a box, which was very similar to the BBC box later on, and he had a very high quality photograph taken - much higher quality than all the other ads in Practical Electronics  - and we put out that ad, and next morning the cheques just kept coming in through the door and we shovelled all that money into the bank. It was just amazing. And I must admit we were a little bit delinquent in the delivery because we just couldn't deliver fast enough - we couldn't make them as fast as people gave us the money. We sold 10,000 of those at £200 each".