I do good to keep up with the major announcements from Apple, much less the secret projects :-) I don't know when it was conceived but the ST IMO was Atari's chance to shine. Tramiel AFAIK was the one who was associated with it, hence the nickname Jackintosh. I don't know much (anything) about the game systems or the 8 bits. The company may well have been better run but tech-wise, I don't see how the 800 type machines were much of a future in the PC world. The ST on the other hand with a laser printer and a quality DTP program in Calmus, etc. at a fration the price of a Mac when the PC was still emerging from 80 column character mode had great promise. In reality, it may have never had a real chance against Apple/Wintel but they never really got enough market awareness to give it a shot. I'm thinking that the PC clone was a 286. The 386 was SOTA for the PC at the time IIRC and they didn't get that fancy. I'm sure someone has it on the web somewhere. They're a couple of good ST emulators floating around and some TOS images. If you want to talk lost opportunities, go no further than Digital Research and GEM ha ha. One thing I miss is SunDog, a truly great game. The creator or someone was working on a new PC version a while back but I don't know what happened with it. Of course, I spent many wrist numbing hours playing the utterly silly MudPies as well.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken