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??
That's a bunch of revisionist BS. The Atari ST 260/520 was a late comer in the game and was Jack Tramiel's essentially off the shelf, down-and-dirty quick GUI, get it out the door, copy of the Commodore Amiga. Neither the Amiga nor the Atari ST were positioned to compete with the Macintosh. They were designed to compete for the home consumer market.
Jack Tramiel, the ousted ex-CEO of Commodore, bought the gutted shell of Atari from Warner Communications under the mistaken belief that Atari had acquired the Amiga. Unknown to him as he negotiated the purchase with Warner, Atari defaulted on the Amiga acquisition by missing the payment deadline, and his former company, Commodore, stepped in and snatched it up. Tramiel raided Commodore's engineering department to staff his new Atari Design Team and told them to come up with something quick. They did. The Atari 260/520 ST was the result. They used CP/M 68k (renamed Tramiel OS) and GEM. It was a non- multitasking OS that looked slick but was really not a competitor to the pre-emptive multitasking, multi-processor Amiga in functionality. It beat the Amiga to market by one week.
Ironically, High Toro, the company that created the Amiga, was founded by ex-Atari engineers... And the Atari was created by ex-Commodore engineers. So, the Commodore Amiga, at heart has more of an Atari design philosophy, while the Atari ST, has more of a Commodore design philosophy.
DRI's GEM, in its original form for CP/M and MS-DOS, was an exact copy of the look and feel, the registered and copyrighted trade dress, of the Macintosh. DRI had lifted from Apple all of the custom icons, the nested drop-down menus, and the exact look and design of the windows down to the drag bars, close buttons, etc. Apple rightfully sued DRI. Atari was not party to the suit. Apple required changes that were NOT functional to GEM but did affect the look and feel of the product. DRI settled rather than lose in court. They made the cosmetic changes. Your assertion that this somehow "crippled" the Atari ST is ludicrous as the lawsuit predated the creation of the Atari ST and involved look and feel issues, not function.