Erm they ported BSD to Acorn machines (RiscIX).
I wasn't arguing for protectionism (e.g. a tariff on competing systems) - just that if the govt had bought Archies instead of PCs and dumb terminals, that it was buying anyway, things would have turned out differently for the whole country, if not wider.
but wasn't really the foundations of a long running computer platform
Interesting, how do you mean? Esp. in light of the state of PC OSs at the time. If you had to restart computing what would you take as your foundation, MS-DOS or Arthur?
Arguably the main problem was never working out how to sell them into the US, but ARM aside too much of the rest of the platform may have been superficially nice, but wasn't really the foundations of a long running computer platform.
What really still amazes me is Acorn didn't put the RISC OS front end on NetBSD back when it became clear running BSD was far more interesting to most of Acorn's own staff than RISC OS was. By then it was probably game over anyway.