My biggest problem with the 2600? The tape drive. I could write the code but if the tape drive crashed during write out, the entire code had to be re-written. Solution was to write small chunks of code to multiple tapes. Yes, I had to swap the tapes, but if it crashed it was just that portion.
Are you thinking of the Atari 400 or 800 instead of the 2600? While there were a few cassette systems for the 2600, they're somewhat rare and the only one that allowed for writing out programs appears to have been a homebrew hack.
You had a tape drive for the Atari 2600 video game system that has no video RAM, 128 bytes of system RAM, a video chip not driven by the ANTIC that requires the CPU to program it for each line, and a crippled 6502 that addresses 4Kbytes of ROM max?
"The Starpath Supercharger (originally called the Arcadia Supercharger) is an expansion peripheral cartridge created by Starpath, for playing cassette-based proprietary games on the Atari 2600 video game console.[2][3][4][5]
The device consists of a long cartridge with a handle on the end, and an audio cassette cable. It adds 6 KB to the Atari 2600's 128 bytes of RAM (increasing it 49-fold to 6,272 bytes of RAM)..."
The Atari 2600 is a video game console, not a computer. See the other comments. You most certainly were not thinking about the 2600 when you wrote this as it is a cartridge based system similar to the NES.
And then, floppies showed up!