The Atari VCS

The Atari VCS was released in the U.S.A. in fall 1977. Some years later it was then released in europe and other continents, too. 1982 Atari started to call this machine "2600" after its model-number, so it was easier to distinquish from the then released Atari 5600. In this year the VCS 2600 als became the dominant videogame machine in germany and other european countries and like many others i bought this fantastic system back then. It was available in nearly all stores with electonic things. Even for the Colecovision (a system from a contrahent) there was an expansion module available to enable it playing VCS games. The VCS 2600 was supported until 1991 from Atari.

When it was developed (Codename: Stella) und released as the Video Computer System (= VCS) no one would have thought that it will be such a great success.

... The original Atari VCS had a woodpanel and six switches: (Power, tvtype, left diffficulty, right difficulty, game select und game reset)
(By the way.. these pages are named after the "Game Select" switch ;) )
... Later the VCS with only four switches was released. The now much smaller "difficulty" switches are placed at the back of the machine. The woodpanel was the same than before.
... The following VCS still had four switches, but the woodpanel disappeared.
... In the later eighties when the VCS was technically not up-to-date anymore, the Atari 2600 jr. was released. It was the same machine with a different design.
...

Besides the normal silver version there was also a black version, however not much is known about is. As far as i could find out this could have been an earlier version of the 2600 jr. (not sure)