Remembering the Coleco Adam Technology product failures will always have a special spot in my heart. Perhaps it's comforting to know even when a team of seemingly talented and intelligent people put their heads together — it sometimes only results in a painful, coconut-like thud in the center of the huddle. This old box logo This week's box is a unique …
I actually owned two of the expansion version (supply your own colecovision). The first I bought, and the second was a replacement for the first. I ended up returning the second one too for a refund. The tape drive had a terrible heat problem. It would get so hot that you could not touch it.
I recall I almost bought one. At that time, a PC was thousands of dollars and a Wang wordprocessor was something like $30,000.00. Even a selectric typewriter was way more expensive. I eventually bought an XT for $2,000 after the prices started to come down and used WordPerfect 4.2. Ah those were the days.
I managed to come up with an Adam unit, sans printer, over a decade ago. After doing some research, I decided that it would be an abysmal waste of time and left it in storage. I do recall, though, that the tape drives in the thing were blazingly fast and pretty intelligent. That's cool.
Paris, because she'd be an abysmal waste of my time.
And raise you the contents of my attic... (A quick look reveals...)
2 x Einsteins
1 x 4032 Commodore Pet
1 x ZX81 (with after market real keyboard add-on)
2 x BBC Micros, both with 80 track (200k wooo) 5.25" floppy drives.
Annoyingly I can't see the Osborne 1. I know I had one once, and would have thought it would be too big/heavy to loose, but somehow I seem to have managed it.
I have the add-on unit sitting next to two, still working, Sinclair/Timex computers upstairs in my lavaboratory (an unused bathroom perfect for my electronics gear and naturally equipped for expressing my feelings when things don't work as planned). For the time and the money the Adam worked remarkably well, when it worked at all. The daisy wheel printer was excruciatingly slow but the results were better than most home and office PC's of the time. The only affordable printing alternative was poor print quality dot matrix.
Wow, that brings back a lot of memories.
The frightening thing is that I remember actually wanting one of these things, at least at first. It seemed like a cool step-up from my Atari 800 and TI 94A, not to mention my homebuilt CP/M machine, which was cool for playing around, but was a useless gaming machine.
<attic inventory>
But no Oric-1? I would like to see that reviewed here - it was a British computer after all. My first home computer, which I selected over Commodore-64 because it was a bit cheaper in Finland, and unlike the 64, had easy to use graphics and sound commands in its Basic: no POKEs needed. Well, I backed the wrong horse... Some points I recall about the Oric-1: calculator-style keyboard keys (but not too bad, as the keyboard size was reasonable), buggy Basic in the 1. revision (the one I got), and a strange graphics scheme, where the foreground/backgound colour of a row of pixels was determined by a some preceding attribute byte in the graphics memory, but said byte took up 6 pixels on the screen!? A truly strange idea, making it very difficult to create hires pictures with many colours. But some games looked good nevertheless.
I see your Adam, and raise you the West PC 800...
(Made in Norway, so you've probably never heard about it)
It was a CP/M - BBC-Basic machine with 2 CPUs(Z80 and 6502), built-in alarm-system and modem(Yes, really), was reputed to be able to take a 68000 daughterboard and run some sort of Unix, and it had a Wireless keyboard(!), all in 1984...
Of course, the keyboard used IR, and to recharge the battery-pack, you plugged it into the West PC keyboard connector.
Of course, the whole first series of keyboards had a faulty regulator which died the moment you plugged it in, releasing a puff of magic smoke.
Also, the PSU was put together at a prison workshop, and the first 50 or so fit so badly that they had to hammer them into place. (The designer told me this himself)
Hmmm... playing the 'what's in your loft' game.
Try: Enterprise Elan, CBM128, ZX80, ZX81, Einstein, Spectra (a few of them), QL
It's a good job I've not got the space to get them out, I could waste a few days playing with the things. Part of me wants to write a new O/S for the Spectrum, just to see what modern techniques could squeeze out of the thing, but then I remember I'm trying to have a life.
Paris, because I met a girl once.
I still have my TRS-80 connected to my "recycled" B/W tv and an Epson RX-80 printer and I ran Electric Pencil on it !! Still works and still sounds like WW3 has started everytime the printer gets into action !! And it had a bit of judicious soldering that allowed it to use the full 64 KB (WOW !!) of memory !!
The whole setup worked out to be cheaper than an IBM electric typewriter (the other alternative) and I could also play games on it !!
And it, too, had a Zilog Z80B in its guts !!
We had a BBC model B, upgraded from A, with a Torch Upgrade: Disk Pack, Z80 second processor board and CP/N ROM. Yes, it's up in the loft, along with the Archimedes 410 (our RISC PC is still in active service).
We were always told never to leave a disk in a drive when we turned it on or off, as it might become corrupted. I never bothered to test the veracity of this claim. It might have been true - in the early 80s few manufacturers at the affordable/consumer end of the electronic market seemed able or willing to suppress their power supplies. The budget music centres all went "pop" when you turned them on or off. In a floppy drive, this could easily translate into a localised electromagnetic pulse around the read/write head, and possibly wipe a vital part of a mounted disk. Of course, this was not a problem on the (more expensive) IBM PCs.
Big deal, so you all have a loft of retro computers. So do I but I don't feel the need to brag about it. Stick to talking about the Coleco or any *proper* retro computer that you don't see around everyday, not the run of the mill Beebs, Commodore 64s or Sinclairs that sold by the million and are in *everyone's* lofts.
I paid my university studies using my Commodore 128, PaperClip128 and a DPS1101. I used to type papers for a quarter a page. I would enter the paper in the computer, print out a draft using an Star dot matrix printer (I was not responsible for errors) and print the final version with the DPS1101. That thing was LOUD! I remember putting pillows on top of it to muffle the sound in my dorm room.
When not typing papers, played lots of games with friends. Imagine the scene: 2 guys are turning their back to you, playing Epyx Summer Games's 100 meter dash, the joystick on their lap... Made for a lot of weird looks...
I interviewed at Coleco in Sept 1983 at their facilities in Amsterdam, NY. I recall that the factory building where they planned on manufacturing Adam was actually empty; no manufacturing equipment what-so-ever! They expected to introduce Adam for Christmas that year. Needless to say I turned down the job offer.
TO 10
I've got a NAND gate and some delay lines.
More seriously, there's a guy in the small town of Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia with an impressive collection of pre-DOS computers (dozens and dozens of different examples). He'll ask you what you think is the very first home computer (My guess: Altair?), and then he'll show you his example of an even earlier one. I think he said he's got three of the five ever made (wharever it is).
IIRC, the ColecoVision used the TI graphics chip. The one that got everybody calling motion-objects "sprites". As such, it was more an equivalent to the TI 99-4 and various Apple-][ add-ins. The 5200 was an Atari 800, more or less, in the same way that the original XBox was a PC.
Coleco's Gemini was just a counterfeit Atari 2600, so even more primitive. (not to mention they fell for a couple traps in the chip when the cloned it, making the lawsuit almost a slam-dunk :-)
There is one sitting at a flea market about three miles from where I live; maybe I will make them happy this summer and buy the beast (cause lord knows, every one needs a pulse bomb.)
I still have my Amiga 2000, a 200 meg hard drive and a box of memory chips; perhaps they can be friends, network, stone age supercomputer, boat anchor.
Actually, I think I will use my Amiga for a fire wall and if it gets out of line I can threaten it with the Adam (if I acquire it; I do sober up on occasion.)
The sucker does sound cool, I started out with a Texas Instruments 99/4a which programming wise was not. I wish I still had that (still have the games) but the back door was open one day and I gave it its freedom (along with a swift kick to the cpu) and after laying in the back yard for a while it went away.
I still get email death threats from the above machine, but relax, it is more or less Skynet's very retarded brother.
I hope.
I remember a lad in my class was supposed to get one of these for Christmas in 1983. I think it eventually got delivered around April or May the following year. He was the only one in our school to own one.
Still, at least he had more games for it than the other lad who managed to lumber himself with a Camputers Lynx.
"Oric-1?... a strange graphics scheme, where the foreground/backgound colour of a row of pixels was determined by a some preceding attribute byte in the graphics memory, but said byte took up 6 pixels on the screen!?"
Yep. Each byte of screen memory had six bits of graphics and two pixels of color information, making anything other than character graphics impossible to program (or at least, very very slow).
I think it's the main reason the machine failed - games programmers refused to touch it and without games a machine was nothing in those days.
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