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Atari is a company originally founded in 1972 that became a major player in the video and arcade game industry. Atari products enjoyed popularity during what some call the “Golden Age” of video games, where engineers were beginning to explore the possibilities of newly developed hardware and computer science methodology.
Techopedia Explains Atari
In Atari’s involvement in the home video game industry, the Atari 2600 home console enjoyed widespread popularity for years after its development in 1977. The Atari 2600 was an early example of an accessible home system using a television as a display monitor that could accommodate a wide range of game programs from different makers through an easy, cartridge-style loading mechanism.
Ultimately, Atari branched out into home computing, with an early rendition of a home computer system with a 16-bit external bus and an internal 32-bit system. Atari released this device in 1985, the year after the first Apple Macintosh computer pioneered the graphical user interface for a home computer. Both Macintosh and Atari designs used Motorola CPUs, as did the Commodore Amiga, another competing product during the mid to late 1980s. Eventually, Atari ceased to develop competitive video game products and went through a series of acquisitions and separations into more obscure corporate divisions that demonstrated a shift away from the early strategy of selling popular consumer technologies.
