[squeedles]

I happened to buy an Atari 800 at the peak of this and was amazed at the metal castings that surrounded everything. That little 6502 could survive small arms fire! That shielding was far beyond anything else at the time.

And you make a good point about the SIO bus - this was when every other machine had unshielded ribbon cables everywhere. Their devotion to daisy chained serial really crippled them in terms of speed, and when USB finally arrived, I initially scorned it due to the prejudice formed by my experience with the Atari peripherals! It turns out they were on the right track all along!

[EvanAnderson]

You may not be aware, but Joe DeCuir, who worked for Atari on the VCS and 8-bit computers, also worked on the development of USB. Some of his Atari engineering notes helped fend off a patent troll who tried to claim USB was infringing. It's a neat story. There are a ton of interviews with him about it. He gave a nice presentation at VCF a few years ago where it was mentioned, too: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dlVpu_QSHyw