> Sewing machines were all the rage I guess. ;)

The Simplicity Pattern Company has been selling sewing pattern guides since 1927.

In the early 1970s it was one of the "Nifty Fifties":

> The Nifty Fifty were a group of premier growth stocks, such as Xerox, IBM, Polaroid, and Coca-Cola, that became institutional darlings in the early 1970s. All of these stocks had proven growth records, continual increases in dividends (virtually none had cut its dividend since World War II), and high market capitalization.

> The Nifty Fifty were often called one-decision stocks: buy and never sell. Because their prospects were so bright, many analysts claimed that the only direction they could go was up. Since they had made so many rich, few if any investors could fault a money manager for buying them. At the time, many investors did not seem to find 50, 80 or even 100 times earnings at all an unreasonable price to pay for the world’s preeminent growth companies.

http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/valuing-gr...

To bring it back to the Atari 800, I remember magazines like Compute and Antic having breathless headlines about how Atari and Commodore played some big part in making the movie. As the new owner of an 800 in 1982, I was quite excited by this. Thinking my Atari could render a lightcycle! Turns out, it was minor sound effect work done on the Ataris. That wasn't quite as exciting.