Hardware documentation and developer software not generally available, and expensive. Internally, Atari did development on minicomputers and cross-assembled th

Hardware documentation and developer software not generally available, and expensive. Internally, Atari did development on minicomputers and cross-assembled the output. For me there was just (slow) BASIC. Information on low-level features (Display Lists, I/O, etc) only came out in 3rd-party magazines & books years later. I experienced the same mindset on the Atari ST & IBM PC later. Reading about GNU was a very novel idea.