Atari

What Does Atari Mean?

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.

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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.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…