"[2] Considering a common experiment carried out by students, producing a cooling curve for hot water, the system would reduce perhaps 15 to 20 minutes of work to a few moments.

This would free up so much time the students would be able to carry out multiple experiments in a typical lab period, perhaps testing the effects of insulation, or producing curves for different materials in a single sitting.

[4] Another was that the engineers had equipped it with joystick ports of unusual flexibility, which allowed them to be used as a general purpose voltage sampling input.

Combining a simple sampling board with software written by a 15-year-old middle-school student, David Egolf, the basic concept was quickly developed.

[11] The system received considerable press, and won the Software of the Year Award for 1984 from Classroom Computer Learning magazine.

[15] By early 1984, the effects of the video game crash of 1983 left Atari in turmoil, and the company was losing over a million dollars a day.

The owners, Warner Communications, became desperate to sell the company, and eventually did so to Jack Tramiel, on 1 July 1984, for $50 cash and $240 million in promissory notes.

She partnered with Ron Thornton of Tufts University and Robert Tinker of the Technical Education Research Centers (TERC), and began development of the coursework.

Accordingly, as Budworth had carried out all of the actual development of an idea amounting to "an analog adaptor for the Atari port", the design was considered his.

[21] Development of the interface continued and they ultimately made a distribution deal with friends who had recently formed Vernier Software and Technology to market into this field.

[26] The AtariLab hardware consisted largely of a single circuit board that broke out the pins in the joystick port into RCA jacks.