Orange is the new beige.

I’ve been picking up a few 8-bit machines on eBay recently. One of which is an Acorn Electron. It was designed to be the “home” version of the BBC Micro which was found in many schools in the UK at the time. Unfortunately, the Electron was plagued by delays (arriving in volume almost a year late), launched in the middle of a massive price war, and design decisions meant that it in graphically intensive applications, e.g. games, it could run at slow as a quarter of the speed of the BBC Micro. Acorn ended up selling the Electron for less than the cost to produce and it killed the company.

The Electron I received was in general in pretty good condition, except it was the wrong color. It was orange.

This isn’t an unusual problem for computers of this age. Over time, exposure to sunlight causes the plastic to discolor, initially with a yellow hue, eventually getting closer to orange or even brown. It’s not the result, for example, of the computer being owned by a heavy smoker.

Fortunately, there’s a solution (although there is some discussion about how permanent the solution is). This is called retrobriting. Silly name, but in essence, it reverses the yellowing using a combination of hydrogen peroxide, heat, and UV light. Fortunately, living in Sacramento, the heat and UV light conditions are usually referred to as “outside”.

All I needed to add was a large clear plastic container and some 40 percent by volume hydrogen peroxide. 40%bv is not the stuff you can put on cuts and get from your local pharmacy. That stuff is usually around 5%bv. The strong stuff is typically used for hair bleaching and can be purchased online (Amazon) for not too much money. You have to be careful with this stuff unless you want to bleach your fingers.

Anyway, after taking the Electron apart (you don’t want to get hydrogen peroxide on the circuit board), I submerged the case and the keys in the hydrogen peroxide for about 4 hours. After rinsing the parts off and reassembling, I got this:

I have seen whiter examples, but in comparison to a photo of a new Electron back in August of 1983, I think it’s a pretty close match.

Note: As far as I can tell, the retrobriting process is bleaching the plastic rather than reversing the yellowing process, so it’s possible to end up with a color that’s actually lighter than the original, which is why I stopped when I did.