Furber: I had the beginnings of a schematic at the beginning of the week, and I detailed the schematic.
We then got some help in to wire up the prototype, and then I was involved with Sophie in debugging the hardware and the software together, which finally came into life at about seven o’clock on the Friday morning with the BBC arriving at ten o’clock. I was still a research fellow, and aerodynamics was still my day job. That BBC Micro contract rush rather took over for a days, and Acorn got the contract. The BBC were confident that with the support of their TV program that Acorn would be able to sell 12,000 of these machines, which was quite a big number for Acorn - that was a business worth going for. Of course, it turned out to be a hopeless underestimate. Eventually about 1.5 million BBC Micros were sold.

the BBC was confident that their programme would cause the order of 12,000 machines to be sold, okay, so 12,000 was enough for Acorn to pay serious attention to. I mean, I’m sure we’d sold more than 12,000 Atoms but it’s still a big increment to the business

I think before the late ‘70s it was simply too expensive. You know, buying a computer was as expensive as buying a car, if not buying a house. And so you’d have to have a really serious use to spend that sort of money. But by the late 70s it was clearly possible to build computers, you know, that cost more like the price of a piece of hi-fi than the price of a car. So that is game changing, I think. I mean, we had no idea of the scale of the game change. I think we probably still felt that computers were for people like us, right, enthusiasts, hobbyists, people who were interested in computers for their own sake and therefore the market of such people is quite small. You know, people who’d be prepared to solder things together to connect them or write assembly code or so on. So we saw, if you like, a sort of growing hobby market and also we saw that these cheap products then gained use in places like university labs and, you know – I’m not sure we’d quite seen the way into schools at that point. So you could see markets of, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of parts. We’d – I don’t think anybody really saw the consumer boom, this sort of computer in every house scenario.

the Atom had sold in many tens of thousands