The BBC Micro was built by Acorn for the BBC's Computer Literacy Project, which taught computing through television programmes and books. By 1985 about four in five British schools had one. Its long cream case had a full keyboard with a row of red function keys.
It was fast for its day, had BBC BASIC with an assembler built in, and came with more ports than any rival: printers, disk drives, networking and its own expansion bus.
Eight colours (plus eight flashing pairs of them), across eight screen modes, from 640x256 in two colours to 160x256 in all eight with wide pixels. Mode 7 was teletext, like Ceefax on the television, with chunky block graphics that used only 1 KB of memory, so many games and programs lived there.
Three square-wave channels and a noise channel, each with 16 volume steps. BBC BASIC added its own software envelopes, so sounds could swell, fade and wobble in pitch.