Atari Corporation was an American manufacturer of home computers and video game consoles. It was founded by Jack Tramiel on May 17, 1984, as Tramel Technology, Ltd., but then took on the Atari name less than two months later when Warner Communications sold the home gaming and computing assets of Atari, Inc. to Tramiel.

Its chief products were the Atari ST, Atari XE, Atari 7800, Atari Lynx and Atari Jaguar; in addition to hardware, the company also published video games for its home systems and also had an in-house development team for Lynx and Jaguar software for porting, or developing original titles such as Warbirds and Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy. In 1996, the company reverse merged with JTS Corp., becoming a small de facto non-operating division which itself closed after JTS sold all Atari assets to Hasbro Interactive in 1998.

The company was founded by Commodore International's founder Jack Tramiel soon after his resignation from Commodore in January 1984. Initially named Tramel Technology, Ltd. (TTL), the company's goal was to design and sell a next-generation home computer. On July 1, 1984, TTL bought the Consumer Division assets of Atari, Inc. from Warner, and TTL was renamed Atari Corporation. Warner sold the division in exchange for $240 million in stock in the new company.

Under Tramiel's ownership, Atari used the remaining stock of game console inventory to keep the company afloat while they finished the development of their 16-bit computer system, the Atari ST. In 1985, they released their update to the 8-bit computer line—the Atari XE series—as well as the 16-bit Atari ST line. Then in 1986, Atari Corp. launched two consoles designed when Atari was under Warner's control: Atari 2600 Jr and Atari 7800 (which had a limited release in 1984). Atari Corp. rebounded, producing a $25 million profit for 1986. The Atari ST line proved very successful (mostly in Europe, not the U.S.), ultimately selling more than 5 million units. Its built-in MIDI ports made it especially popular among musicians. Still, after initially outselling the Amiga line, its closest competitor in the marketplace, the Amiga outsold it 3 to 2 in the end.

Atari eventually released a line of inexpensive IBM PC compatibles, announcing a budget model at "a record-breaking price of under $599" in early 1987, to be followed by a more expandable PC-2 model at a higher price point, this being announced alongside the PC-3 in November 1987. Responding to the introduction of the low-cost Amstrad PC1512 in the UK, price points for the initial PC model were given as around £400 including VAT for a 512 KB floppy-only model supporting CGA, EGA and Hercules graphics, rising to £1000 including VAT for a hard drive model. Later, the company introduced an MS-DOS compatible palm computer called the Atari Portfolio.

Atari, under Tramiel, had a poor reputation in the marketplace. In 1986 a columnist for Atari magazine ANALOG Computing warned that company executives seemed to emulate Tramiel's "'penny-pinching' [and] hard-nosed bargaining, sometimes at the risk of everything else," resulting in poor customer service and documentation, and product release dates that were "perhaps not the entire truth ... Pretty soon, you don't believe anything they say." He concluded, "I think Atari Corp. had better start considering how they're perceived by the non-Atari-using public." The company, however, was much more open to the press than its predecessor Atari Inc., which had refused to let Antic preview forthcoming announcements and even opposed the magazine printing the word "Atari" on its issues.

On August 23, 1987, Atari agreed to purchase the Federated Group for $67.3 million. October 4, 1987, Atari completed the acquisition and gained full control of its own retail stores. In the final quarter of 1987, Federated lost $6.4 million in day-to-day operations. A post-acquisition audit ended on February 15, 1988, and identified $43 million in adjustments to Federated's balance sheet, far more than Atari anticipated. The net worth of its acquisition was reduced by $33 million. Atari's CFO later claimed that they would never have done the deal had they known at the time. Federated's operational losses increased, reaching $67 million for its first full year under Atari in 1988. The FBI began an investigation of Atari in May of that same year for an ongoing scheme involving the profitable import and resale of Japanese DRAM chips in the US, "in violation of U.S. import laws and contrary to import agreements." This alleged DRAM scheme was purportedly to offset the unanticipated losses in the purchase of Federated. In March 1989, Atari announced that it would treat Federated as a discontinued operation and took an additional one-time charge of $57 million. Federated was eventually sold to Silo in 1989.

In 1988, Stewart Alsop II said that Atari was among several companies that "have already been knocked out" of the GUI market by Apple, IBM/Microsoft, and others, but Atari's sales hit their peak that year, at $452 million.