These were halcyon days for Atari. Although the ST was increasingly being overtaken by the Amiga, the company were able to announce this week 10 years ago that it had the UK's fastest selling computer when its Portfolio sold 4,000 in its first 10 days on sale. The Portfolio, developed by DIP Systems (who went on to make their own 'version') was the first palmtop PC, being less than the size of a VHS video case. It had a QWERTY keyboard (unlike the market leader, Psion's Organiser) and would run for 100 hours on three AA batteries. Files could be uploaded to, and downloaded from, a desktop PC and the Portfolio came with DOS 2.11, an ASCII text editor, calculator, diary (with alarm!), address book and a spreadsheet that was compatible with Lotus 1-2-3 - all for £199.

Atari were planning to manufacture 70,000 a month and received initial enquiries from British Gas, police forces and ITN; even the Royal Family requested evaluation samples. It was a nice machine that was perhaps, like Apple's Newton, a little ahead of its time - palmtops are everywhere these days. After the initial burst of enthusiasm, sales dropped off rather alarmingly (a large part of the 4,000 sales were pre-orders placed at the machine's February launch). The pinnacle of its success came in the film Terminator 2: Judgement Day, when the young John Conner used it to hack into a cash machine and, later, the Cyberdyne vault. It has been sighted only rarely since.

Justifying the 'halcyon days for Atari' in the introduction, 10 years ago this week Atari were preparing to launch their (colour screen!) handheld games console, the Lynx. The new Atari ST Power Packs had just been released (complete with 20 games and a sample copy of a new magazine, ST Format, from a little known publisher in Bath), and sales of their ancient VCS 2600 console were still remarkably constant. In all, Atari's sales for their second financial quarter a decade ago were a rather large $82.7 million.

Sadly for Atari, this was as good as it got. In addition to the Portfolio failing to take off, in the coming years the VCS range was wiped out by Sega and Nintendo, the Lynx suffered from both a lack of software and reliability issues and the ST wilted under the pressure of the Amiga. Atari weren't finished yet though - there were still two last-throw-of-the-dice machines on the drawing board which were projected to turn their fortunes around: the Falcon computer and the Jaguar games console...