Re: BBC Micro..
I'm a huge fan of the BBC micro (and still have one permanently set up). Having said that...
The BBC micro was not a good home computer for the majority of homes in the UK. It was a great machine for education, because it could be used for so many things. But in the home, most people just ran games, with a few people doing spreadsheets and word processing, and even fewer actually writing serious programs on it in a home environment.
The Beeb had too little memory to be a truly excellent gaming machine. Yes, there are exceptional games out there, obviously Elite, and Sentinel, but if you look at the ports of games written for other systems, the Beeb often looked poor and worked even worse (compared to, say a C64 which had more memory and sprite support, or the 48K Spectrum, which despite it's simple colour system, had plenty of memory to make up for it's deficiencies, while both being significantly cheaper).
Yes, you could do semi-serious home office type things well beyond what other 8-bit home micros could do (note, in the UK, I do not include the Apple ][ as a home machine, if you thought the Beeb was expensive, you should have seen how much an Apple was in the UK), but adding disks and a printer to a BBC micro pushed it well beyond what a normal household could spend, and well into the cost bracket of serious office systems running CP/M.
It was an excellent educational system, where you could share printers and disks across a well defined network, add a multitude of different peripherals and other languages, and even link these things together quite easily, but in a home, those advantages didn't justify the cost.
By the time the Electron and BBC B+ and later models came along to try and rectify the cost and memory issues, you had Atari STs and early Amiga systems looking very good and at similar prices.
Acorn's fortunes and their impact in the later computing world would have been very different if the Electron had made it to market when it should. Even as it stands Acorn changed the world, they gave us ARM and some WIMP features that are still influential today, but just imagine if they could have made Archimedes at the same price point as the Atari's, something that they may have been able to do if so much money hadn't been lost on the Electron!