[chesterbr]

I get your point, but I must say that the Apple II had LISA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazer%27s_Interactive_Symbolic_...), which wasn't half bad for the machine - guess I was a luckier 13 year old, because I happened to have stumbled upon a copy :-)

Also, developers who had a bit more of resources (e.g., minicomputers) even used them to emulate 8-bit systems (unlikely to have been done for the Atari, due to the complexity of TIA, but a textbook case is how Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed the Altair Basic using Allen's 8080 emulator for the PDP-10: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC).