I was there. I met Dave Small (Littleton, CO) several times at Atari shows, and once when I paid his airfare to my office in '95. Late in the 80's I watched him insert a floppy drive into the Atari and turn it into a Macintosh. Think about that. Everything that made the Macintosh what it was was reduced to some code on a floppy. The Atari ST & Macintosh were both 68000 'puters, and so was the Amiga. The Atari ST was color, though from Day 1 while the Macintosh was still a black & white computer.

The illusion that the Apple Chips were necessary was a go-around to prevent him from being prosecuted by Apple for copying their intellectual property. That's all that it was. The Atari ST hardware, unmodified, was as good, or better, at being a Macintosh than Apple's own hardware was and the difference was nothing more than a couple of hundred K of code on a floppy. This was not entirely either a coincidence or 100% genius on Dave's part because Motorola published a reference design on how to build a computer with the 68000 that all these companies followed. That's how Motorola achieved these design wins for its 68000 CPU. At the time the Intel CPU was the infamous 'brain dead' 286. You had to be there.