1983's Atari 1200XL: a super system doomed by a super price

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Atari's 1200XL should have been a success of the 8-bit home computing era: modern, compact, designed to compete with the breakout Commodore 64, and good-looking to boot. But it was a fiasco, writes Paul Lefebvre, due to poor compatibility with Atari 400/800 software and a high price tag. Most interesting, though, was what might be described as a r…