I had one friend in the UK who had an Atari 8-bit computer and I remember being awed by a game I'd never seen anywhere else and only worked out what it was many years later, in the internet days - Rescue on Fractalus.

It certainly blew the socks off anything my Acorn Electron was capable of... .

It's always fun to see young industries where there are dozens of different competitors all vying to be the one that wins in the end. So many wacky designs that ultimately don't survive.

That said, times like this are also a nightmare for third party people like software developers, accessory developers, administrators, etc... who all have to design their stuff to work on only a portion of the market or put loads of development effort into porting to more of the platforms. It is no wonder that the natural state is for most of the competitors to die off and for users to rally behind either one platform or one standard.

In Belgium, before my C128, I had an Atari 600 XL. Very good looking 8-bit Atari machine. And some Dragon 32 were to be found in Belgium too.

I don't think the Atari 600 XL and 800 XL somehow made it to France, Belgium, etc. but not to the UK.

As an American I love hearing all about machines that we completely missed from overseas. Little parallel universes to learn about and experience. (Helps that a lot of my favorite retro gaming YouTubers are British, too. ;))