Actually Jay and his team wanted to create te ulitmate computer platform. Atari was an important funder but did not see a home computer as a viable enough market. So Jay`s team agreed to concentrate on the ultimate gaming device while allowing it to be flexable enough to be turned into a real computer. After that Atari agreed on funding the development of the Amiga custum chips.
The game market tumbled and the launch of a new ultimate gaming platform seemed undesirable. So Jay and his team shifted focuss on developing a multimedia machine instead again: The Amiga 1000
When the machine was almost finished Atari wanted the custom chips very badly and thus demanded a full refund of the loan given to Amiga Inc. Amiga got in very deep trouble and almost signed the agreement with Atari. Then commodore stepped in and offered Amiga enough money to pay Atari their loan back. They also agreed to take the whole developing team. 10% of the total sum payed by commodore was enough to pay back the loan given by Atari!
The Amiga 1000 was released and did very well. Atari was concerned about commodore taking the entire home computing market and rushed out the rival Atari ST to slow down Commodore.
The Atari ST exceeded pretty well as many software didn`t take advantage of Amiga`s custom hardware so developers could easily suppport both platforms without too much trouble. Some software of the early software ran even a little faster on Atari ST machines since it used a slighty faster processor!
Atari sucked. Commodore Sucked. MS sucked (and still does). Apple sucked. At the time almost every large company sucked and screwed eachother over and over again. The innovative companies either got bought out or bankrupted.
