Back from the Grave: Acorn A4000 (Battery leak, environmental damage)

Despite its obvious performance advantages against much all of the competition, Acorn redesigned its formerly-Archimedes systems to compete on the new battlefront: price. In 1992, this would be realised with the implementation of the ARM250 - an SoC variant of the ARMv2 chip. While raw performance was slightly inferior to the ARMv3 that had been used since 1990, the removal of many discrete components resulted in potentially significant cost savings

Sadly for Acorn this still wasn't enough to bring them to the forefront. By this point in time, Intel's x86 and IBM's PowerPC had basically claimed a duopoly on both the home and professional computer markets. Acorn would go on to continue their efforts to make inroads with the RiscPC but would not manage to gain the notoriety they deserved until the late 2000s.

Back from the Grave: Acorn A3000 (Battery leak)

In 1983, Acorn - already well known for the existing BBC Micro - set about attempting to compete with IBM in the business domain.  After determining that all the existing options were unsuitable they would settle on designing their own processor, unknowingly becoming one of the grandfathers of modern computing. Following successful simulations run in BASIC on a BBC Micro, in 1985 they would produce the first prototype Acorn RISC Machine processors, better known today as ARM processors.

It would be a further 2 years before these processors would see a commercial release, however, as the ARMv2 powering the brand new BBC Archimedes. A dozen or so models were released in all over the next 5 years eventually producing the ARMv3 and perhaps the first ever example of an SoC in a commercial product with the ARM250 variant of the ARMv2.

While their obvious performance advantage over the existing competition, especially in 32-bit scenarios, went largely unnoticed (and largely unused in 2D games), it's fair to say their legacy has well and truly outlived all but x86 when it comes to modern computers.