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?