[16] However, with Acorn facing financial strain due to various endeavors, the company was rescued by Olivetti in 1985, leaving the future of the ABC range uncertain in the expected restructuring process.

Unlike the previous models, the A3000 came in a single-part case similar to the BBC Micro, Amiga 500 and Atari ST computers, with the keyboard and disc drive integrated into a base unit "slightly smaller than the Master 128".

[74] Acorn also sought to secure the interest of games publishers, hosting a conference in August 1989 for representatives of "the top 30 software houses, including Ocean, Domark, US Gold, Grand Slam and Electronic Arts".

[79][80] Aiming at the "pre-Christmas market" in 1990, another bundle called Jet Set offered a more entertainment-focused collection of software valued at £200 including Clares' Interdictor flight simulator, Domark's Trivial Pursuit, Superior Golf, and the Euclid 3D modelling package from Ace Computing.

The A4 effectively fit an A5000 into a portable case, having a motherboard "roughly half the size of a sheet of A4 paper", adding extra hardware for power management and driving the LCD, the latter employing an Acorn-designed controller chip using "time-domain dithering" to produce the different grey levels.

[65] Pricing started at just under £500 including VAT for the Family Solution bundle: an unexpanded A3010 with no monitor (to be used with a television), combined with the EasiWord word processor and one game (initially Quest for Gold).

The existing Learning Curve bundle, updated to incorporate the A3010 upgraded to 2 MB of RAM in place of the A3000, included an Acorn colour monitor, the PC Emulator and a suite of Genesis hypermedia applications for a price of £799.

The A4000 Home Office bundle combined the A4000 with Acorn colour monitor, Icon Technology's EasiWriter 2 "professional word processor" and Iota's Desktop Database application for a price of around £1175.

[102] The pricing and bundles involving these machines was updated in late 1993, introducing a new Action Pack in place of the Family Solution, featuring the game Zool plus Icon Technology's StartWrite word processor.

The Home Office bundle was updated with Iota's DataPower replacing Desktop Database, and with Colton Software's PipeDream 4 and Acorn's PC Emulator being added to augment EasiWriter.

While outlets such as the John Lewis Partnership proved to be successful marketing partners, electrical retailer Dixons seemingly made relatively little effort to sell Acorn machines despite promising "greater opportunities" in 1993 after earlier criticism.

Persisting with the strategy that some purchasers might choose a product positioned between games consoles and traditional PC-compatibles, the distributor, ZCL, aimed to take advantage of the absence of Commodore during the Christmas 1994 season.

[119] Following on from the release of Arthur 1.2, Acorn itself offered a "basic word processor", ArcWriter, intended for "personal correspondence, notices and short articles" and to demonstrate the window, menu and pointer features of the system, employing built-in printer fonts for rapid printed output.

[152] As part of an effort to grow the company's share of the home market, Acorn introduced a bundle called The Learning Curve, initially featuring the A3000, optional monitor and a set of applications (First Word Plus, the PC Emulator, and Genesis).

[37] This delivered a range of enhancements to the operating system including multitasking filer operations (meaning that file copying, moving and deletion no longer took over the computer), support for reading and writing DOS format discs, the provision of various bundled applications (Alarm, Calc, Chars, Configure, Draw, Edit, Help and Paint), commonly used outline fonts, and software modules in ROM (instead of needing to be loaded from accompanying floppy discs into RAM), the removal or raising of limits on windows and tasks, the ability to "iconise" windows and pin them to the desktop background (or pinboard), desktop session saving and restoring, screen blanking support, and other printing and networking improvements.

Regarded as being "considerably faster than the Acorn emulator when displaying graphics", with a two-times speed improvement observed for various tested programs, the product was considered appropriate for gaming, albeit at lower than VGA resolution.

[171] Having considerably improved graphical capabilities compared to those provided with Acorn's 8-bit machines, a number of art packages were released for the Archimedes to exploit this particular area of opportunity, albeit rather cautiously at first.

[177] Despite a trend of gradual adoption of desktop functionality, in 1990, Arcol from ExpLAN offered a single-tasking, full-screen, 256-colour editing experience using the lower resolution 320 x 256 mode 13, supporting only bitmap fonts.

[195] Described in one preview as "perhaps the easiest to use, but most advanced graphic illustration package, on any personal computer today", ArtWorks provided an object-based editing paradigm reminiscent of Draw, refining the user interface, and augmenting the basic functionality with additional tools.

Targeting machines with only 1 MB of RAM, various traditional word processing features such as a spelling checker and integrated help were omitted, but as a frame-based document processor it was considered "excellent value for money" when compared to the pricing and capabilities of some of its competitors, even appealing to the home market.

[214] In the spreadsheet category, Longman Logotron's Eureka, released in 1992, provided robust competition to Schema and PipeDream, seeking to emulate Microsoft Excel in terms of functionality and user interface conventions.

[228] Support for video authoring on the desktop emerged in 1993 with the Replay DIY product from Irlam Instruments: a single-width podule suitable for A540 and A5000 computers with 2 MB of RAM or more, these being the only models available at the time with the necessary performance.

[256] Despite the adoption of C++ class libraries on other platforms, Acorn chose to provide user interface component functionality using a collection of modules, known as the Toolbox, accessible at the system call level instead.

[308] Somewhat more applied testing demonstrated speed-ups for benchmark programs of up to eight times, aligning with Acorn's claims, but contrasted these gains with the broader performance increases attainable from an ARM3 upgrade, these offering a more general four-fold speed improvement.

However, various free of charge or low-cost programs ported from other systems, such as POV-Ray, plus selected native applications such as Clares' Illusionist and Oak Solutions' WorraCAD, did exhibit substantial performance gains from the FPA with speed-ups of between five and ten times.

[351] Other networking approaches were available, including the sharing of hard drives using a SCSI bus,[352] and emerging technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode were deployed on the Acorn platform, notably in SJ Research's Nexus product.

[240] In early 1988, Computer Concepts announced its own ROM/RAM podule that was capable of accepting seven chips, each with a maximum capacity of 128 KB, supporting the use of installed RAM as "a RAM-disc filing system" with optional battery backup to retain the contents with the machine powered down.

[5] Dissatisfaction with this arrangement was voiced by competitor Research Machines and an industry group led by a Microsoft representative, the British Micro Federation, who advocated the use of "business standard" operating systems such as MS-DOS.

Noting that the scheme was "not purely philanthropic", concern was expressed about the effect on the Acorn market and that schools were needing to "resort to charities and publicity stunts to get the basic tools to do the job".

The Acorn Advantage programme, launched in September 1994, offered a loyalty scheme whereby points were accrued through purchases and redeemed for "curriculum resources" that included non-computing items such as musical and scientific instruments as well as computer hardware.