In the summer of 1984 Atari, Inc was sold to Jack Tramiel (former head of Commodore) who renamed the company Atari Corp. and promised an all new line of computers and updates to the aging 8-bit line of computers. The new computers were designated numbers to represent their memory configuration such as the 130XE had 130,000 bytes of memory and the XE stood for XL line Enhanced. At the winter 1985 CES in Las Vegas Atari displayed several types of XE systems such as the 65XE and 130XE which were later released, other systems were shown which were never released such as the 65 XEP (the "P" standing for Portable) and the 65XEM (the "M" standing for Music, the 65XEM was to have an AMY sound chip. Problems plagued the project and it never came to market.)
Essentially the XE were not much of an improvement of the XL series. The XE utilized technology from the 1400/1450 XL computers such as the FREDDY chip for memory management. The ECI (Extended Cartridge Interface) was nothing more then the XL Parallel Bus Interface (PBI) repackaged to cut costs. The keyboards were mushy feeling and the keys were white and tended to get dirty quickly, and the function keys were on a 45 degree angle making them clumsy to use at times, the 65XE's lacked an ECI all together.
Although sold as a GAME SYSTEM, the XEGS was a repackaged Atari 65XE with Missle Command built in. However the one nice feature of the system was the detachable keyboard. With the exception of the unreleased Atari 65XE-P Portable (Luggable) computer, the Atari XEGS was the only Atari 8-Bit computer system to ever have a detachable keyboard.
