The news from France is mixed: Minitel could be argued to have held back the internet in France. Nuclear power research and trains pushed them to the forefront ("10 or 20 years ahead" as you say). Home-grown OSes like Chorus failed after spending lots of money.
On the other hand the French pay more for everything from energy to computers.
Pop quiz. What did the following commands do?
*.
P.
*OPT4,3BBC BASIC on the original RISC PC was my first experience writing code. I think that machine is still in my parents' garage along with the 6 volume BBC BASIC reference manual.
I think you're thinking of the four volume RISC OS Programmers' Manual, plus slim index, that came in a big white cardboard sleeve. Augmented later by a Volume 5 of changes with later OS versions to save re-printing costs. BASIC itself was introduced in the User Guide that came with the machine IIRC and had a one-volume reference manual of its own at additional cost.
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.
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?