The first generation of microcomputers were based on 8-bit chips originally devised for traffic-light controllers and the like. Intel came out with the first 16-bit microprocessor in 78 but the segmented-memory architecture was so fubar that the entire community of OEM microcomputer makers out in Silicon Valley looked at it and looked at the specs for the 68000 and said thanks but no thanks, we'd rather wait the two years and if Intel had been a Japanese company at the time the board of directors and owners would have committed sepuku at that point since that clearly would have been more shame than they could have lived with.
Thus the natural decision of the 300 or so companies making microcomputers at the time was to let Intel die. IBM then stepped in with the PC and reversed the entire natural market decision and the one company which was in a position to make any sort of a mass market computer using 68000 chips and challenge IBM on the point was Apple, which thereupon produced two 68000 computers (Lisa and toaster-mac) which were so pathetic they convinced most of the world that the 68000 chip itself was a bad idea. In fact both computers used the 68000 chip itself to generate graphics, remnant compute power being less than a 2mh trash-80. Decent memory and disk capacity were conspicuous by their absences, the two joke machines having only one very slow floppy disk.
Then, in 1985, Atari came out with a totally gorgeous microcomputer, the 520ST, which was what the PC should have been from day one: an 8mh 68000 chip, a real graphics card, a real color monitor, the GEM GUI environment, a fast floppy and a good hard disk available at realistic price.
Apple, realizing that they would need four years starting from then to produce anything similar, hauled Atari's reps into their offices in Cupertino and demanded both money and a list of crippling changes to the GEM environment, threatening to tie the thing up in courtrooms for ten years otherwise, and Atari and DRI caved, i.e. the consumer never got to see anything like the full capability of the ST.
This was similar to Msoft's tactics in shutting down the good version of OS-2 in 93. The problem of course is that the next time the United States needs to wait four years for Apple or Microsoft to catch up, it might be somebody in India or China who catches up.
But the thing that gets to me is Apple playing games like that and then calling themselves the 'counter-culture' computer or 'the computer for the rest of us(TM)'... What do they mean by the 'rest of us'? The Cosa Nostra??