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Interestingly, Atari was bought by Jack Tramiel who was the founder of Commodore Business Machines that made the Commodore Vic-20, Commodore 64 and more.

January 1984, Jack Tramiel essentially got booted out of the company he founded (Commodore).

July 1984, Jack Tramiel bought the Consumer Division of Atari Inc. from Warner Communications.

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It's even more interesting. Commodore hired a bunch of ex-Atari people for the Amiga while Tramiel was building his cadre for what became the ST. They basically swapped talent.

https://dfarq.homeip.net/atari-st-vs-amiga/

If you squint enough, there's a chain that looks something like this: Atari 2600 => Atari 400/800 => Amiga => Atari Lynx => 3DO.

It's not that there's a specific set of people or technological concepts running through all of them, but each one has a strong connection to the next.

There is a lot of similarity between the Atari 400/800 display list and the Amiga copper list given they were developed by the same team.

Think 5200 is in the middle of your first two, since I believe architecturally it was a 400 without a keyboard (or more accurately, the 400 was basically a 5200 with a keyboard).

But yeah, that's super interesting too. I skipped Lynx in my console journey so wasn't as familiar with that, but I didn't realize the 3DO (which I did have) was loosely part of the talent family too. But yeah, now that I think about it, I guess Hawkins must have ended up tapping the talent pools freeing up from the ST/Amiga/GS generations since those died out right around the time 3DO was being developed.

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