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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

The Atari 8-bits were introduced in 1979 and were moderately popular in the early 1980s at least in the US because they had considerably better graphics and sound than their competitors. This was due to (unlike most other early 8-bits) they used custom chips similar to those later used in the Amiga -- and in fact one of the primary engineers for the Atari 8-bits was Jay Miner, who also played a big role in the Amiga.

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Ah, it may never have reached the UK. Conversely you've probably never heard of the Oric-1 or Dragon 32. The 8 bit boom was quite a time.

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. ;))

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.

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.

Atari missed the 1982 Christmas season with their cost-reduced XL models that were potentially competitive with the C64. The 8-bit line never recovered from that.

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