Arguably there is one company that did manage to make the transition from 8 bit hobby home computing and gaming. Apple.

The Apple II was a contemporary, in fact a predecessor of all these systems. So, what did they do right, or what went right for them, that enabled them to make it? I suspect it was the penetration of the Apple II into education and business that helped make it possible, but suppose Steve Jobs had been in charge at Commodore or Atari?

I've thought about this a bit, and what I can come up with is that Apple had the clear lead in the first wave of home PCs in the late 70s (the others being the Commodore PET and the TRS-80 model I), and maintained it. The Apple II had bitmap graphics and colour built-in, and a very fast and relatively cheap disk add-on, but also well thought out expandability. You didn't need to buy a sidecar unit; just throw a card in an empty slot. Importantly, it also worked with inexpensive TVs and monochrome monitors that you could purchase separately. The hardware was also high quality - it had a nice keyboard, and a switching power supply that didn't get hot.

Fast forward a few years, and the Apple II was still very usable and competitive, with RAM expansion options up to 128k, higher res graphics, and 80 column text, while still supporting the same software.

One other thing is that the Apple II was wildly profitable. It had no custom chips, just cleverly used commodity chips and some ROMs. This includes the fast and cheap disk system.

> I suspect it was the penetration of the Apple II into education and business that helped make it possible

I don't know how much it moved the needle but it was astonishing how much schools and home users - parents whose kids used the machines at school - were willing to pay for an Apple II well after it was a technically obsolete machine. It definitely helped them to some extent.

(don't get me wrong, I love those machines in my bones, but they were pretty overpriced after a while)

Excellent question and one I already touched on in a sister reply before I saw your post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43722230

Apple is indeed an extraordinary outlier (as is Jobs). If you look into the history of Apple's Gil Amelio days, very near-death and Steve's return, it was IMHO, a remarkable example of a series of fortunate miracles coinciding to allow Steve to brilliantly save the company when it had been only weeks away from death. Jobs calling Bill Gates and convincing him to quickly loan $400M to Apple averted disaster potentially by a matter of days. And Gates only did that because MSFT was being sued for anti-trust by the Justice Dept and needed Apple to survive as an example that Wintel still had some competition. Apple's survival in that period is the closest close thing I think the industry has ever seen.

To answer your last question, Jobs was undoubtedly incredibly brilliant but it took every ounce of that brilliance AND some crazy good luck for Apple to survive. Ultimately, it was Jobs plus flukes, so no, just Jobs without the flukes wouldn't have changed anything at Atari or Commodore. Even on its death bed Apple had a much better brand, distribution, market potential and talent than Atari or Commodore ever did. Plus Steve had his hand-picked entrepreneurial team from Next with him. The situations at Atari and Commodore were just much weaker in every way, so I don't think any single super hero, no matter how super, could have saved them.

> So, what did they do right, or what went right for them, that enabled them to make it?

Desktop publishing.

The Macintosh/LaserWriter cash cow absolutely dominated desktop publishing for a very, very, very long time.

This gave Apple access to enterprise accounts that other computer companies did not have.