What if...

I'm doing research for a story I'm doing on the 40th anniversary of the mainframe computer and came across an interesting tidbit: IBM in the late 1970s was toying with the idea of rebranding Atari computers to create a PC line -- it's attempt to take on these crazy Apple IIs and TRS 80s that were so popular at the time.

IBM's executive council rejected the idea, and as we all know, IBM built its own PC line, albeit using off-the-shelf components. The rest is history. (In a last gasp, Atari would eventually develop its own line of IBM-compatible PCs.)

I can't help thinking whether the Atari platform would have become standard had IBM had gone ahead with the idea. Would the platform, which would presumably be harder to clone, have become so dominant? Would Motorola (which made the chip) be the dominant CPU maker rather than Intel? Given my experience with Atari, would I have become a programmer instead of a journalist?