Well, it was more the heir to the Atari 800 where the Atari ST was actually the heir to the Commodore 64. The Atari 800 was far and away better at graphics and sound than the Apple II.
I remember buying this one, and seeing an Amiga a week later in the mall. The Prolog article blew my young mind. How in the heck is it figuring this out, BASIC doesn't do this?!?
I agree the Amiga is clearly influenced by the Atari 800, as Jay Miner's mere presence would indicate, but the Atari ST was mostly off the shelf hardware and the Commodore 64 was anything but. About all those two systems have in common philosophically or otherwise is an intentional skew to the low end of the market, and Jack Tramiel (but I repeat myself).
This. --would even go so far to say Atari ST was intentional knock off of Amiga 1000 styled after Commodore 64/128. Tramiel spent his life building Commodore BUSINESS Machines (after his family was killed by Nazis) only to have it taken away by a new chairman (Irving Gould) who reportedly "gained control in a poker game." Tramiel reportedly dropped $45K buying the dead Atari name (from Warner Bros IIRC?), hired a hack for the design and relied on the MC68000 to do all of the processing (including graphics, though it probably had a DSP) and then dishonestly marketed the hardware as equal or superior to Amiga, knowing full well it did not have the enabling chipset that Amiga Inc. had spent four starving years developing in Los Gatos before he acquired them for a song while still at Commodore. (Many of those engineers later died of self neglect in the Aftermath of the Gould/Tramiel war.) The novice computer users and even business/data processing types of that era couldn't tell the difference between Amiga 1000 and AtariST based on that level of marketing or what few demos were available, but they sure could see the price difference and that's how Tramiel took his revenge on Irving Gould. Worse, "In business, perception is the reality" and "Careful who your enemies are, as they will define you" --so despite the then 30 year legacy of Commodore BUSINESS Machines and despite Atari being nothing but a halloween costume being worn by Jack Tramiel, Commodore quickly came to be seen by Corporate America as a video game toy maker like Atari. (Even you allude to this perception in saying that they had an "intentional skew to the low end of the market"). Bill Gates, who knew better of Commodore, didn't help things any when he brilliantly decided, probably after consulting with Steve Jobs, against porting his MS Office to Amiga, which totally ruined Amiga's credibility --because why wouldn't Gates want to support the very best chipset on the market, if it truly were? Then dystopia...
Please forgive me for this flippant speculation - if there's a biographical record of those who died of self neglect presumably in despair please can you information or suggest sources* - but I can't help but thinking how much rebranding simply to CBM could have done for Commodore Business Machines. Granted, three letter abbreviations are jealously guarded commonly across industrial classifications, but usually specious and purely with pseudo legal hubris and wishful thinking. I may have just touched on a good reason why something like this wasn't attempted. I can't imagine the original Commodore folk going in for any superficiality or legal shenanigans let alone affecting their identity. Thus Tramiel set the tone for commerce in the computing age much more broadly, I'm thoroughly disheartened to imagine.
* not least because the industry was infinitely more (historical invocation of the word) artisanal and the work personalized, I very much want to read. If I may be so forward, it sounds like you have personal history close to this. I'm seriously interested in doing anything possible to help get history like this published with effective general reader marketing and can tap a variety of serious resources and experience.
I remember buying this one, and seeing an Amiga a week later in the mall. The Prolog article blew my young mind. How in the heck is it figuring this out, BASIC doesn't do this?!?