*The first affordable modern computer: 16-bit CPU, linear memory, GUI, mouse, high resolution 640x400. At much lower price than the Amiga 1000 or the Apple Macintosh.
*Inferior to the [[Amiga]] yet still better (the war still rages on nowadays). It was easier to do work on Atari, while on Amiga a guru meditation (machine crash) was never far away. Also the TOS was in ROM which means it could be used immediately and it didn't consume valuable RAM. And as the OS was immutable, less time was spent customizing it, freeing up more time to do productive work. Also the The hardware was also simpler to develop for than compared to the baroque Amiga architecture.
*A hardware [[MIDI|Midi Port]] : this spawned a generation of Musician Geeks. And some Atari ST games did use Midi sound as an option. [https://forums.atariage.com/topic/301647-midi-games/ Source]