[ATARI] How Atari took on Apple in the 1980s home PC wars

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    12-21-19

How Atari took on Apple in the 1980s home PC wars
Atari’s 400 and 800 packed some of the most advanced tech of their era
and ran the best games. Forty years after their debut, they’re worth
cherishing.
[Photos: Flickr user Adam Jenkins; Evan-Amos/Wikimedia Commons; Videvo]

By Benj Edwardslong Read

Forty years ago, Atari released its first personal computers: the Atari
400 and 800. They arrived in the fall of 1979 after a prerelease
marketing campaign that had begun the previous January when the company
unveiled the machines at what was then called the Winter Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Then as now, “Atari” was synonymous with “video game,” and the new
machines packed more technological potential than any game console at
the time, with custom graphics and sound chips, support for four
joysticks or eight paddles, and the ability to play games on cartridge,
cassette, or disk. At launch, one of the machines’ first games, Star
Raiders, defined cutting-edge home entertainment.

And yet Atari initially marketed the 800 and its lower-cost counterpart,
the Atari 400, as “second-generation” PCs—productivity machines with
enhanced graphics and sound capabilities over the 1977 holy trinity of
personal computing: the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80. The company
intended them to crunch home budget numbers just as often as they
simulated space battles.

Idiot-proof and rugged, Atari’s Home Computer System machines (I’ll call
the platform “HCS” for short) represented a huge leap in
consumer-friendly personal computing. Unlike many PCs of the time, the
Atari machines exposed no bare electronics to the consumer. Unique keyed
connectors meant that all of the machines’ ports, modules, and
cartridges couldn’t be plugged into the wrong places or in the incorrect
orientation. The 400 even featured a flat spillproof keyboard aimed at
fending off snack-eating children.

And due to restrictive FCC rules that precluded the open expansion slots
on the Apple II, Atari designed a suite of intelligent plug-and-play
peripherals linked together by a serial IO bus that presaged the ease of
the much-later USB.

In some ways the Atari computers even exceeded the state of the art from
Atari’s coin-op department: In 1979, most Atari arcade games shipped
with black-and-white monitors, using translucent gel overlays to
generate pseudo-color. The Atari computers played games in color from
the start—if the consumer provided the color TV set, of course.

At launch, the Atari 800 retailed for $999 with 16K of RAM (about $3,387
when adjusted for inflation), and the Atari 400 with 8K retailed for
$549 (about $1,861 today). Compared to a game console such as the Atari
VCS at $190, that was expensive, but it undercut the 16K Apple II’s
$1,195 retail price in 1979.

This fancy retail kiosk let consumers learn about Atari’s computers—and
even partake in a game of Pac-Man. [Photo: courtesy of Atari]
My own association with Atari’s computers goes back to 1981, when my
father bought an Atari 800 for my older brother Jeremy, five years my
senior. I grew up watching him wear out its joysticks by the half-dozen
while mastering his skills in Asteroids, Dig Dug, and Archon. And the
Atari served as more than a game machine for him. With its BASIC
programming cartridge, the Atari opened up software as a malleable thing
that could be shaped at will. It was on the Atari 800 that my brother
amazed me with his homemade BASIC simulations of aircraft dogfights,
among other wonders that my 4-year-old mind could hardly fathom but
loved nonetheless. He later became a software engineer.

The author’s brother and a neighbor enjoy some Atari 800 quality time
circa 1983. [Photo: courtesy of Benj Edwards]
Decades later, I still play Atari 800 games with my kids. It’s my home
entertainment version of comfort food—a rich pastime best enjoyed by a
roaring fireplace in a wood-paneled den. The Atari home computers
projected a distinctive voice as an entertainment platform that I can’t
get anywhere else. Games such as M.U.L.E., The Seven Cities of Gold, and
Star Raiders take me back to a golden era in PC gaming and remind me
that technology can create timeless classics as well as any other medium.

The author’s brother programming the Atari 800 in BASIC. [Photo:
courtesy of Benj Edwards]
I’ve often wondered what cultural and business elements came together to
make this breakthrough platform—this favorite electronic friend from my
childhood. With some digging, I recently found out.

Video game genesis

In 1977, Atari released its first video game console with
interchangeable cartridges, the Video Computer System, or VCS. (The
company would later rechristen the machine “Atari 2600” from its model
number, CX-2600.) A group of Atari engineers led by Jay Miner
anticipated a three-year market lifespan for the 2600, which contained
only 128 bytes of RAM. (As a frame of reference, the Nintendo Switch has
more than 30 million times as much.)

That same year, Atari’s home computer platform began to take shape as a
high-powered follow-up to the 2600. Many questions swirled around the
next-generation machine. Should it remain compatible with the VCS but
offer more features? Or should Atari make a clean break with the past
and launch a far more advanced design?

    Personal computers became the new cool thing, and Atari’s engineers
wanted a piece of the action.”

“I was in the Homebrew Computer Club when Steve Wozniak introduced the
Apple I in the winter of 1976,” says Joe Decuir, one of the Atari 800’s
chipset architects and a veteran of the 2600 team. Decuir had begun
working at Atari in 1975, hired to help with the VCS design. “One of the
reasons I took the job is I thought that the project after a game
machine was going to be a computer,” he explains.

Atari engineers weren’t blind to events around them in Silicon Valley.
Ideas cross-pollinated between companies through social connections,
local interest groups, and employee poaching between firms. One of the
most important technological and societal movements of the 20th century
had been taking shape: the birth of the personal computer. PCs became
the new cool thing, and Atari’s engineers wanted a piece of the action.

Decuir says, “A lot of us were kicking around ideas about what a
computer would do while we were doing [the 2600]. And as the core of the
game machine grew, Jay Miner and I and company became the core of the
computer design group, which was a much larger project.”

This group included talented Atari engineers such as Steve Mayer,
Francois Michel, George McLeod, Doug Neubauer, Mark Shieu, and others.
(Later, Doug Hardy and Kevin McKinsey handled industrial design.) After
some brainstorming, the engineering group began with a simple goal: to
take the 2600’s video chip, called TIA, and integrate computer-like
capabilities such as text generation.

After many iterations, the new chip became the CTIA, the graphics
integrated circuit at the heart of the new home computer. Then they
designed a chip to take the load off the main CPU by feeding graphics
data to the CTIA, and that became ANTIC, itself a custom microprocessor.
The engineers also added a chip to handle keyboard, paddle input, and
four-channel sound, called POKEY. These three custom chips, in league
with a 6502 CPU, would form the core of Atari’s home computer architecture.

As a plan developed between 1977 and 1978 from many design meetings,
Atari’s engineering team narrowed down the computer to three product
options. There would be a low-end machine, nicknamed Candy, that would
serve as a game console with an optional keyboard attachment; a high-end
machine code-named Colleen with advanced, integrated features and an
expansion bus; and a machine with an integrated monitor. They ended up
dropping the integrated monitor idea and focusing on Candy and Colleen.
Those would become the 400 and 800 computers.

To compete with the Apple II, the higher-end Atari 800 would need
peripherals. And that’s where the FCC got in the way. All electronic
circuits emanate radio waves when current flows—it’s one of the
fundamental properties of electricity. To make sure that TV-related
electronics devices don’t degrade TV reception, the FCC tightly
regulates the radio frequency (RF) emissions that they can release.

At the time of the Atari HCS’s development, the FCC kept very strict
rules on RF interference. Atari wanted an RF output that would allow the
800 to use a regular TV set as a display, but that meant clamping down
on the potential expandability of the system. Atari engineers designed
thick metal shielding within the 400 and 800 that blocked
electromagnetic emanations from its core electronics.

That kept Atari from creating an “open box” type system, similar to the
Apple II, where users could plug in any expansion card they wanted. The
Apple II avoided FCC issues by not connecting to a TV set directly;
instead, Apple allowed a third-party company to provide that as an
aftermarket option. As a hobbyist machine, the Apple II could get away
with that. The TI-99/4, released in 1979, skirted the RF interference
issue by shipping with its own special monitor—a stripped-down TV set.

Texas Instruments lobbied to have the RF interference rules relaxed, and
the FCC granted a conditional waiver of the rules in late 1979 (it
finally changed them in 1983), but by then it was too late for Atari to
simplify the design of its machines before launch.
M.U.L.E., an early Electronic Arts game, combined action, strategy, and
economic theory on a planet named Irata (get it?). [Screenshot: courtesy
of MobyGames]
Killer app in space

After finishing up design work on the POKEY chip, engineer Doug Neubauer
began writing a game for the new computer system in development. It
would be a first-person interpretation of his favorite computer space
strategy game, Star Trek, which was making the rounds on high-powered
mainframes at the time. His game, Star Raiders, included a real-time 3D
universe full of alien ships, starports, and meteoroids. Its unique
design began to attract attention within the firm.

“The first day I came [to Atari], one of the programmers sat down with
me and said, ‘Get a load of this,’ and showed me Star Raiders,” recalls
Chris Crawford, who had recently joined Atari as a VCS software
developer and was to become a high-profile game creator and software
evangelist for the HCS platform. “And that was what blew me away. There
was absolutely nothing like it in the world of personal computers. It
was just way beyond what anybody would have expected.”

In its time, Star Raiders was as dazzling as video gaming got.
[Screenshot: courtesy of Moby Games]
Neubauer sought to realistically model 3D space, and he integrated
advanced graphics routines that had never been seen in a PC or home
console game. When an enemy ship exploded, the game engine calculated
its flotsam as 3D points that could be viewed from any angle, including
an aft ship viewpoint as you flew through it. Rich and dramatic sound
effects complemented the game’s visual flair to an extent that wasn’t
possible on competing home PCs or game consoles at the time.

While playing Star Raiders, you use a joystick to pilot a starship from
a first-person cockpit view. A starfield swirls around your viewpoint
realistically as you move the stick, but the full breadth of the
controls proved too complex for just the one-button Atari joystick to
handle. Players can call up a detailed galactic map, change speed, turn
on shields, or choose other options by pressing certain keys on the
computer keyboard. Upon engaging hyperspace with the H key, your ship’s
engines rev up, and stars streak across the screen like the Millennium
Falcon in Star Wars.

“Star Raiders just blew [Atari cofounder and then CEO] Nolan [Bushnell]
and upper management away,” recalls Decuir. (Bushnell was involved with
initial plans for the new computers, though he was forced out of Atari
by its owner, Warner Communications, around a year before they hit the
market.) “They said, ‘Well, we can’t sell the game machine without a
keyboard.’ So they came up with this membrane keyboard for the 400. That
was our original game machine, but it came out as a minimally functional
but useful computer. You needed a keyboard to play Star Raiders.”

Shortly thereafter, the low-end Candy model of the Home Computer System
became the Atari 400 that Atari was to release—a sleek, dark beige
machine with a completely flat keyboard built in. Though good looking,
the keyboard wasn’t fun to type on—but it did let everyone experience
Star Raiders. The high-end machine, the 800, would have a conventional,
full-travel keyboard more suited to tasks such as word processing.

Even the lower-end Atari 400 offered dazzling multimedia capabilities
compared to the Apple II and other first-generation home PCs. [Photo:
courtesy of Atari]
Atari kept the 400 and 800 segregated within a new home computing
division within Atari. Its VCS game console had just begun to soar on
the market, and some within the firm feared that the 400/800 would
cannibalize its sales if marketing emphasized the computers’ gaming
attributes too keenly. The revolutionary nature of Star Raiders
completely disrupted that plan.

In an era energized by 1977’s blockbuster film Star Wars, Atari’s new
space game provided an engrossing mixture of action, strategy, and
simulation unlike any that came before. Shortly after their launch,
people began buying Atari 400 and 800 machines solely to play Star
Raiders. It became the killer app for the Atari computers and remained
the game to beat for at least two years into the HCS’s lifespan.

In 1981, Mike Moffitt, a Pennsylvania newspaper journalist, described
Star Raiders as “the Cadillac of home video games” and “the most
sophisticated of all home video games.” He also noted the high price of
the systems required to play the game but concluded it was worth it.

Just as the Atari 400/800 soared thanks to Star Raiders, the competing
Apple II—then the main target of Atari marketing—became a breathtaking
success due to business applications such as VisiCalc. For a time, Atari
charged ahead with the serious business angle for its home PCs,
reluctant to fully and publicly accept the platform’s deep video game
capabilities. It created an unusual dissonance noticed by the press and
consumers alike.

“Atari all along struggled with its identity,” said former Atari
employee Dale Yocum in a 2014 interview with the ANTIC Atari podcast.
“Atari was a game company, and people identified it as a game company.
But Atari really wanted to be a personal computer company. And it was
hard to convince a Fortune 1000 company that ‘Hey, what you really want
to do is buy a bunch of Atari computers and put them on everybody’s desk.'”

Despite the huge gaming draw, many dedicated owners did use their Atari
800s as serious computers for productivity tasks and telecommunications.
But with a 40-column text display, slow serial-based peripherals, and
limited expandability, the Atari 800 wasn’t the most efficient machine
for the job. (By the mid-to-late 1980s, my dad kept an Apple IIc right
next to our Atari 800. The Atari reigned for gaming, while the IIc
pulled duty as 80-column word processor and spreadsheet machine.)

According to Crawford, Atari wasn’t too upset about the tepid reception
of their new product line as a “serious” machine—it was rolling in the
dough from video game sales. A cost-saving quirk of the 2600 video chip
design allowed Atari’s creative programmers to extend the console’s
lifespan far beyond what Atari’s engineers expected, resulting in more
sophisticated games and greater sales by 1979.

“That Christmas, the VCS was so successful that they gave a huge bonus
to all the programmers,” says Crawford. “And so, the feeling was, ‘Wow,
we are on the right track.'”
The golden age of indie software

After the 400 and 800 launched, power users awed by Star Raiders proved
eager to flex the machine’s advanced capabilities. But Atari, following
its closed model with the 2600, had never intended to spill the secrets
of the HCS architecture outside of special agreements with contracted
developers. Crawford recalls, “There were about half a dozen people I
knew who’d been bugging me for that information, and I had told them,
‘No, I can’t tell you anything.'”

The Atari 400’s flat keyboard frustrated typists but didn’t prevent it
from being a superb game console. [Photo: Flickr user Michael Dunn]
Software for the HCS came slowly. At first, Atari retained only one
programming department for both the VCS and HCS lines. As Atari’s main
breadwinner, VCS software took precedence. “The rule was you cannot do
anything on the HCS until you’ve had one game completed for the VCS,”
says Crawford. But the easier-to-program HCS became an attractive
target. “The general sentiment in the programming department was, ‘I
want to move to the HCS as soon as possible.'”

The executive preference for 2600 software put an internal chokehold on
Atari 400/800 program development, especially in terms of games, which
Atari management frowned upon. Crawford recalls making a presentation to
Atari marketing about a new educational simulation about energy policy
(later called Energy Czar). “I went through the presentation, and at the
end, the VP of marketing fixed me with a cold stare and asked, ‘Is this
a game?,'” he remembers. “I hastily replied, ‘No, no, it’s an
educational simulation.’ He looked at me warily and said, ‘I don’t know;
it sure looks like fun to me.'”

Atari’s Chris Crawford in a humorous personal shot taken by his wife
recalling his WWII-themed Eastern Front game. [Photo: courtesy of Atari]
Up until that point, all software for the Atari’s 2600 game console had
been published by Atari. But times were changing in the video game
industry. In 1979, a group of disgruntled star software developers left
Atari and founded Activision, which would later release blockbuster
titles for the VCS. Some of the programmers, such as David Crane and Al
Miller, had been responsible not only for most of Atari’s hit 2600
titles but also for writing the operating system and several games and
applications for the new 400/800 platform. Although many talented
programmers remained at Atari, the loss of top game design talent proved
a setback for Atari’s internal software development capacity.

In 1980, things began to shift. After considering the demand from
independent developers, the Activision exodus, and the success of
Apple’s large and vibrant third-party software market, Atari executives
reversed its closed-platform home computer policy. Crawford received the
news with joy and contacted developers. “I got on the phone, called them
all up, and said, ‘Well, guess what? Where do I mail the documentation to?'”

    The Atari Program Exchange feels like an early, mail-order-based
version of the iOS App Store.”

As a productivity machine, Atari had lost valuable time in the market
with a slim suite of primitive applications (mostly developed
internally), although an Atari version of the original spreadsheet,
VisiCalc, did land in late 1980. By early 1981, the size of the HCS
software library paled in comparison to those of machines from Apple and
Radio Shack. A 1981 review of the Atari 800 in InfoWorld, about one and
a half years into the HCS launch, noted the Atari’s distinct lack of
software and called it “an impressive machine that has not yet reached
its full computing potential.”

Atari needed software, and fast. To champion developers, Chris Crawford
created the Software Development Support Group within Atari. As a first
project, it created a user-friendly development bible called De Re Atari
(meaning “All About Atari”), which became the de facto guide for Atari
computer programming. Crawford also began flying around the country to
give in-person two-day seminars about how the Atari 800 worked and how
to program it.

On another innovative front, an Atari employee named Dale Yocum
petitioned Atari management to start a new division within the firm that
would solicit programs from the general public and publish them in
low-cost bare-bones packaging under the name Atari Program Exchange (APX).

With APX, authors submitted programs for consideration to Atari. If the
firm accepted their creations, authors received a royalty for sales of
their product through a quarterly catalog published by Atari. In
retrospect, the model feels like an early, mail-order-based version of
the iOS App Store.

Thanks to this push for software by people such as Crawford and Yocum,
the Atari 800’s software library expanded dramatically in size and
quality after 1981, with some of PC gaming’s greatest hits of the golden
era originating on the machine. In addition to the groundbreaking Star
Raiders, Atari’s HCS played host to seminal masterpieces such as
M.U.L.E., The Seven Cities of Gold (both by Dani Bunten Berry and Ozark
Softscape), and Archon (Free Fall Associates), all published by a
then-new company called Electronic Arts. Text adventure games such as
Infocom’s Zork also did well on Atari’s computers.

Atari’s APX arm published games such as Chris Crawford’s ambitious
Eastern Front 1941. [Photo: courtesy of Atari]
An indie software market similar to the one that had been flourishing on
the Apple II sprung up around the Atari 800. A few early APX titles,
such as Caverns of Mars and Eastern Front (1941)—a war game from
Crawford himself with revolutionary scrolling map techniques—became
breakout hits that sold tens of thousands of units, at a time when that
was a big deal.

Game industry legend Sid Meier, the creator of Civilization, began his
professional development career at home thanks to Atari’s computer.
“When I got my 800, probably the first game I wrote was very similar to
Space Invaders,” Meier told me in 2007. “I took it to my local computer
store, and they had very little software for sale. I put it on a
cassette tape and into a plastic bag. I remember they bought 5 or 10
copies of it.”

Thousands of other small developers would develop games for Atari’s home
computers by the end of the decade.
The end of an era

Even though vibrant software flourished on Atari’s home computers in the
early 1980s, the platform’s business foundations remained far from
certain. Atari’s home computer division remained largely unprofitable,
carried along by the success of Atari’s coin-op and home console
divisions. At the worst possible time for Atari, competition in the home
computer space from the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A and the Commodore
VIC-20 began to heat up to fever pitch—just as other competitive factors
came together to threaten Atari’s future.

By mid-1982, the Atari 2600 game market resembled a frenzied gold rush.
The astounding financial success of Activision inspired dozens of firms,
including food manufacturers and media companies, to create their own
VCS software. The market became glutted with poor-to-middling quality
games. Around that time, American consumers also began to embrace
low-cost home PCs for gaming.

Electronic Arts’ Archon was a chess-like game with arcade-style arcade
action. [Image: courtesy of Moby Games]
With sales of 2600 hardware and software slowing down, Atari released
its long-anticipated follow-up to the VCS, the Atari 5200 SuperSystem,
in November 1982. Despite being over five years old, Atari’s HCS
architecture remained advanced enough to form the basis of the 5200,
which held its own graphically against competing consoles such as
Intellivision and ColecoVision. But Atari slipped up. Most 5200 games
shipped as slightly enhanced ports of earlier 400/800 titles on larger,
incompatible cartridges. Terrible controllers and software
incompatibility with the 2600 and 800 held the 5200 back, and a dramatic
turn in the video game market the following year sealed the console’s fate.

There was more trouble on the horizon. In August 1982, Commodore
released the Commodore 64, a low-cost home computer with a beefy 64K of
RAM and advanced graphics that borrowed numerous pages from Atari’s
playbook. It also benefited from lower raw materials cost (due to
relaxed FCC rules, not as much RF shielding was required) and
lower-priced chips. Like the Atari 800, the C64 included a keyboard,
played games on cartridge or disk, used Atari-style joysticks, and even
included a serial IO bus for disk drives and other accessories.

To undercut Texas Instruments and Atari, Commodore began a price war
that dropped the cost of home PCs from $500-$1000 per machine to
unsustainable $50-$200 levels by mid-1983. Earlier that year, Atari
launched the lean and stylish Atari 1200XL computer, which remained
largely compatible with Atari 400/800 software but shipped with 64K of
RAM. With an $899 price and no significant new features over the cheaper
800, the 1200XL was a dud with both reviewers and consumers.

The Atari 1200XL had an updated look but wasn’t a technological advance
over the 800. [Photo: courtesy of Atari]
In the summer of 1983, Atari released yet more iterations of the HCS in
the form of the 600XL and 800XL, which replaced the aging 400 and 800
machines. They fared much better with the press (and sold well with
consumers once manufacturing quantities rose the following year). But
these new machines couldn’t undercut the Commodore 64 on price.

With the 64, Commodore found itself with a hit on its hands, but its
scorched-earth success came at a terrible cost to the industry around
it. TI pulled out of the market, and Atari sustained heavy losses that
coincided with simultaneous losses in the home video game division.
Commodore underwent its own round of turmoil, leading to the resignation
of founder Jack Tramiel. The market would eventually recover, but the
short-term damage was immense.

The troubles at Atari precipitated an investor panic in its parent
company, Warner Communications, and before long, Warner began soliciting
offers to offload Atari’s consumer hardware divisions. In 1984,
Commodore founder Tramiel rounded up a group of investors and bought
Atari’s consumer divisions for around $200 million.

Seven Cities of Gold pioneered open-world gaming—with surprisingly
evocative graphics for its time. [Image: courtesy of Moby Games]
Once the dust settled and Atari’s consumer divisions changed hands, the
new Atari Corporation released several other variations of the same
1977-era 400/800 architecture in 1985: The Atari 65XE and Atari 130XE
(the latter of which included 128K of RAM, a first for the platform).
Announced alongside the more powerful Motorola 68000-based Atari 520ST,
Atari’s 8-bit machines continued to target the low-cost home computer
and gaming markets.

The 1979-era Atari HCS technology received one final chance on the video
game market as the Atari XE Game System in 1987, but it was too little,
too late—Nintendo’s brilliant post-arcade software for the NES made the
XEGS’s stale game rehashes pale in comparison.

Throughout the 1980s, Atari’s home computers remained moderately popular
entry-level home machines, but they never eclipsed Commodore in market
share in the U.S. Despite gaining some success with its XE line in
Eastern Europe, Atari formally pulled the plug on all of its 8-bit
computer products on January 1, 1992. Tramiel’s version of Atari held on
a bit longer, selling newer computers and video game consoles, but
reached the end of its run in 1996.
A rich legacy

As the world collapsed around corporate Atari in the 1980s, my brother
and I remained blithely unaware of the turmoil. I didn’t learn about
“The Great American Video Game Crash” until the 1990s. Our Atari 800
still worked, and we kept enjoying the fun moments it brought us.
Endless games of Archon and Salmon Run enriched our lives. It remained
our family’s chief game console until we bought an NES in 1988, and even
then, we never really put the Atari away; it usually came out every year
around Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Friends of the author’s family play an Atari game. [Photo: courtesy of
Benj Edwards]
Even today, some 35 years after I first played an Atari 800, I am still
discovering amazing new games on the platform. The catalog is deep and
full of unique gameplay ideas that weren’t often seen in later 2D
console games, and nostalgic hobbyists still develop new games for it.
While I own a PlayStation 4, a Nintendo Switch, and a Steam PC, an Atari
800 XL takes pride of place on a desk in my family’s gaming room. My
kids love it.

Just before filing this article, I unexpectedly found an old email from
my dad, printed out in a binder of my Atari notes. He passed away in
2013, but a decade earlier, I had asked him about our family’s personal
computer history. “We bought the Atari 800 about the time you were
born,” he wrote. “It cost $1000 (plus another $450 for the disk drive
later), which was more than we could afford, and mom was unhappy that I
spent the money on it.”

“In retrospect, the Apple II would have been a better long term
investment. But also in retrospect, stretching the budget to afford the
computer was well worth it since it gave you and your brother valuable
skills worth more than money. Mom knew that soon after, of course–she
never held a grudge about those purchases.”

Some successes are bigger than business. The Atari home computers were a
cultural phenomenon that brought joy to a generation. Thanks, dad—and
happy birthday, Atari 800.
About the author

Benj Edwards is a freelance journalist who specializes in tech history.
He is also Editor-in-Chief of Vintage Computing and Gaming, a blog
devoted to vintage technology.
"""

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