Chris Kohler, author of Power Up and games writer at Wired penned a nice piece on Racing the Beam for Wired's Game|Life blog.

One of the ideas we discuss in the book that Kohler picks up on is the fact that the Atari was manufactured and supported until 1992, albeit in increasingly smaller numbers. Today it's almost impossible to imagine a computer of any sort living a fifteen year life, but circumstances were different in the 1980s. I sometimes call the Atari VCS the VW Beetle of videogame systems.

In hopefully related news, the book's Amazon rank is up to 600 as I write this, which I'm pretty sure is higher than any of my books has risen, even after the Colbert bump.