Little Acorn finally makes it into the oak tree league today (Wednesday) with the launch of no fewer than eight business systems.

Its first complete new systems since the Electron start with an intelligent terminal and rise through a range to a 80286-based machine that gives IBM's PC AT a run for its money on paper.

The machines will be demonstrated at the Personal Computer World Show. There are a terminal, a stand-alone word processor, a pair of bundled small business systems, two out-and-out number crunchers, and a couple of systems that hoist Acorn straight into competition with IBM and the business hordes.

Acorn hasn't settled on prices yet, but it expects to start delivering the machines in January. The largest, according to marketing manager Tom Hohenberg, could cost around £3,500.

For that you're offered a 256K system with 700K on diskette and a 10Mb hard disk. This, designated the 310, also has a colour monitor, all powered by the Intel 80286 that IBM's AT uses. Besides the colour it also exceeds IBM's machine for applications software. Acorn has opted for Digital Research's Concurrent DOS, which offers a degree of compatibility with MSDOS, PCDOS, and CP/M-86, and it follows Apple's lead by including Desktop Manager, a mousey program apparently inspired by the Macintosh.

Apart from the terminal and the word processor the new systems all come in pairs. The 100 and 110 are Z80, CP/M machines packaged with word processing, spreadsheet and database software. The 200 and 210 are driven by National Semiconductor's 32016 processor and this section of the development program has been held up by supply problems with this chip. These two systems have 256K of RAM, as do the 300 and 310.

Throughout the range, the 10 indicates that the machine has a colour monitor and a Winchester disk drive. All the systems have the same physical construction - a separate keyboard and one box for the system, the monitor and the drives. We are reliably informed that, in a break with Acorn tradition, the cabinets are black and gold.

Acorn isn't remotely daunted by the prospect of taking on IBM on its own turf. Hohenberg claimed that the company already has 12 per cent of the UK small business market with BBC micros and various additions. It also have an iron in the fire with Torch, whose Graduate is due to be delivered in November.

But it acknowledges that there is much work to be done appointing and training dealers.