Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Atari 2600 was released around September 1977 under the name Atari Video Computer System, or Atari VCS. It was renamed the Atari 2600 in November 1982, coinciding with the release of the Atari 5200, with the number derived from the manufacture part number CX2600.
The home conversion of Taito's Space Invaders, released in 1980, was the Atari 2600's first killer application. It was the first officially licensed arcade-to-home console conversion and sold 1.25 million cartridges in its first year, eventually totaling more than 6 million copies by 1983.
Activision was formed in 1979 by former Atari programmers including Crane, Whitehead, and Miller, who began developing third-party games for the VCS. Atari sued them for intellectual property infringement in 1980, but the two companies settled out of court, with Activision paying Atari a licensing fee and becoming the first officially recognized third-party video game developer.
Two Atari 2600 games were major factors in the crash: Pac-Man, a flawed port of the arcade original that nonetheless sold over 7 million copies, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, programmed in roughly six weeks, of which an estimated four million cartridges were manufactured but only about 1.5 million were sold. Combined with a glut of low-quality third-party games, these releases eroded consumer confidence and triggered a collapse in the North American video game market.
An estimated 30 million Atari 2600 units were sold over the console's lifetime. Production ended in 1992, more than 14 years after the console's 1977 launch, though European sales continued and the last official Western European stocks were not cleared until the summer or fall of 1995.
In September 1983, Atari sent 14 truckloads of unsold cartridges and equipment to a landfill in the New Mexico desert. The event became a widely repeated urban legend claiming millions of cartridges were buried. When the site was excavated in 2014, the actual number of cartridges found was 700,000, confirming accounts from former Atari executives rather than the exaggerated claims.