Well yes, but again this being the late 80s I was thinking not BBC micro but Archimedes or even the Cambridge Workstation, both of which were considerably more

Well yes, but again this being the late 80s I was thinking not BBC micro but Archimedes or even the Cambridge Workstation, both of which were considerably more powerful than anything else available on the market at the time (in the comparable price segment) even if they were not directly marketed to business. The Cambridge was available in xenix form IIRC, and by the time the a5000 came along in I think 90 or 91 acorns platform was fully matured onto ARM architecture by then, although I admit few would have foreseen just how significant an advantage that could have been at the time.