The Acorn Atom prehistory Before making consumer oriented computers Acorn made industrial and educational systems. The optional keyboard for these systems is very similar or identical to the Atom case. So it was only a small step to integrate the electronics of CPU, VDU and memory card into one board with the keyboard and create the Atom. The pictures and text below are from the Control Universal Ltd. catalogue. Control Universal started as an AIM65 reseller and sold the Acorn cards as extensions for the AIM. When Acorn hit success with the BBC Computer they sold the industrial card business to Control Universal. This company eventually designed and made the EuroBEEB which was a 6502 eurocard with onboard BBC BASIC that allowed the use of graphics and analogue and digital io for industrial control purposes.

Website: http://www.xs4all.nl/~fjkraan/comp/atom/history/index.html