“When the Atari 400 & 800 launched they managed to land without much interest, and failed to get traction, especially in their native US market. Why weren’t they success, what bad luck and unforced errors got them to that point, and why were they such a great design?”
I have read that at one point IBM considered selling rebadged Atari computers to quickly enter the personal computing market before deciding to go with an in-house project.
Yep. A lot of Atari fans didn’t learn about this until several years ago, and were quite gobsmacked, thinking the story had to be fake. It was real, though! Even many Atari employees didn’t know about it. It was a hush-hush project. The planned “IBM computer” was really a rebadged Atari 800 that would’ve had a white case (as opposed to beige).
What’s rather interesting about this was that when IBM was considering this idea, Atari hadn’t released the 400 and 800 yet. The technology was still in development. Atari wouldn’t release them for another year or two.
It makes me wonder a bit if Atari was inspired to create the 800 because of IBM’s interest and input, or if they already had it in mind, and IBM came along later.
There’s apparently an industrial design prototype by Tom Hardy (1979) for a repackaged Atari 800 to be found in the IBM archives:
(from “Delete. A Design History of Computer Vapourware” by Paul Atkinson, via)
