I was at Atari when, one fine day, some folks in the UK that we had never heard of did a product announcement about an Atari computer that definitely was not coming out of our engineering group. (We were down to one building at that point, if you don't count our remote office in Monterey as part of the GEM porting effort).
I remember the Tramiels being a little flabbergasted by the Transputer announcement as well.
Wow, thanks for that tidbit of history. Always enjoy your Atari reminiscences.
I was a summer intern at the UK company (Perihelion) doing the Atari-based Transputer machines. The word there was that because Atari had invested in the UK company (?) the Atari machine was essential to include as the front-end, even though it didn't really fit the UK designers' idea of what a good front-end machine would be... (nothing against the Atari design, just that its quirks/shortcuts didn't match up with the Transputer cluster backend 'vision').