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The Atari 1200XL fiasco

The Atari 1200XL was the third Atari 8-bit computer.

Announced in late 1982 and available in early 1983, it was designed as a replacement for the Atari 800, which was becoming increasingly expensive to produce, and to serve as a better competitor to the upstart Commodore 64. The 800 had several motherboards and a heavy case with lots of metal shielding, both of which made it impractical for Atari to lower its price much without losing money. The fact that Atari didn’t bother to really test popular 3rd party software, such as Letter Perfect, upset a lot of users.

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