The Coleco Adam Computer
dfarq.homeip.net
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The Adam came with a dot matrix printer. All in one giant box. I know because I found one at the flea for $30 once, and I had to carry it for a mile to the car. Very heavy and awkward.
To turn on the Adam, first, you plug the printer into the wall, then you plug the computer into the printer. Then you make absolutely sure there is nothing in the tape drive. Then you turn it on.
If you had a tape in the tape drive when you turned it on, so much juice went through the thing that it demagnetized anything in the drive. Back then, using audio tapes to hold data was revolutionary, in terms of storage space and price. The payoff, however, was that it was slower than anything you've ever used in the modern day. It could take 30 minutes to load something into the system through a tape.
So imagine waiting all that time, and then finding out it just doesn't work (no error message, just a hung machine) because you left the tape in the drive when you turned it on. You'd basically have to leave the thing on and loading for hours before finally giving up because of lost data.
This thing came with a Buck Rogers game, and that's what everyone wanted to play. The Coleco (formerly a Leather company) folks were overflowed with complaints and angry phone calls as everyone and their mother put that tape in and fired it up, first thing. An absolute travesty of a computer, all the way around the block.
It was a daisy wheel printer. No graphics, but "letter quality".
> Back then, using audio tapes to hold data was revolutionary, in terms of storage space and price.
Those aren't ordinary cassettes - while it is possible to make an Adam cassette out of a normal audio cassette, it's a somewhat involved process. There was hardware sold back then to do it, as the Adam itself couldn't.
> Those aren't ordinary cassettes
Years earlier, my Color Computer (from that other leather company, Tandy) was reading and writing to ordinary cassettes (also sold by Radio Shack).
The folks I knew who could afford Apple IIs had the cash to spend on floppy drives but I think their computers supported cassettes.
I had friends in pre-Adam days who had Commodores and one with a TI-99, all of which had plain old cassette storage, too. In the 70s-80s that was slow but affordable. This was anything but revolutionary for the Adam.
I'm looking into converting one into a teletype by doing a MITM between keyboard and logic board.
No, use of audio cassettes to store data was well established when the Adam came out. The difference was that it was much faster than other home computers, which typically used a standard cassette deck, or something close to it.
It definitely did not take 30 minutes to load a program from cassette. Here's Buck Rogers loading in 12 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jyt2u78qAFs
While it's true that early production machines had reliability problems, the same was also true for the C64. The machine we got for xmas 1983 was as solid as a tank.
The tapes were extremely robust and resistant to abuse, much more so than floppy disks. I tried to fry tapes, and couldn't.
For games, the tape drives were surprisingly effective. Sequential data transfer rates are faster than the C64 disk drive, and unlike the C64 they operate independently from the main CPU, with DMA access to the full 64 kB address space.
This means that many games were up and running in seconds and could load upcoming levels in the background while you were playing the game.
(The tape drives were much less effective for random-access, file-based storage, as the seek times were obviously atrocious compared to a disk drive.)
First-party software was also very high quality.
The problem was the business plan. Coleco made the same mistake as Atari and Texas Instruments, in that the business plan was modelled after the game console business. The tapes were expensive and proprietary when they didn't need to be, and the 3rd-party software ecosystem was completely locked down. Technical info was unavailable for hobbyists and independent developers.
By the time the Adam is released, the C64 and Apple IIe are already entrenched in the home markets with exponentially expanding library of independent software. The Adam's locked-down ecosystem couldn't complete.
It only took one year for hobbyists to completely reverse engineer the Adam, at which point some interesting independent software starts to appear. But by that time the business was already dead.
The C64 disk interface is notoriosuly broken. The C64 and the 15x1 drives effectively had the same relatively fast processor but with a tiny pipe connecting the two.
Then I upgraded her to an IBM PC with Windows, and she stopped using the computer altogether! She just never made the jump to a windowed system with a mouse.
That's funny, my parents were the same. They started using computers with punch cards, then moved to teletypes, terminals and finally DOS-based PCs. Never made the jump to Windows, which they thought was "too complicated."
They told me I could play with it, and in short order I had it set up and running. It came with a cassette for Dragon's Lair, which was way too hard of a game for me but was amazing quality for the hardware, it was like playing a cartoon in real time.
After a few weeks, they realized I was the only one messing with the computer, so they asked me if I wanted it. It was several decades old at this time, but I said sure.
Took it home and got it set up, only for my stepdad to throw a hissy for some unrelated and long forgotten reason a few weeks later and toss it in the trash.
Please tell me he didn't live.
Life shouldn't be hard.
I brought home a Coleco ADAM from the club and was really amused at how the cassette deck made sound effects by rewinding during this game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Rogers:_Planet_of_Zoom
I also remember it being very heavily built with a strong metal frame.
In the early 1980s there was an expectation of rapid change but things hung in the air for years because those machines were built around the display controller and had clocks locked to the video system so they couldn't make a Commodore 65 that was 30% faster than the 64 and do the same with a Commodore 66 the year after that. Plus there were no real operating systems, no hardware independence so you couldn't count on porting software to a better machine.
Many of the successful machines like the Apple ][ and C-64 had brilliant cost reductions around the disk drive, my TRS-80 Color Computer didn't so a $399 computer mated with a took a $599 disk drive. By 1985 though cost-reduced disk drives were about become a commodity (see IBM PC) and it was too late to come out with an advanced tape. Adding a daisy wheel printer was a really cool and different idea, I had plenty of dot matrix printers and even pen plotters in the 1980s but it was the only daisy wheel printer I played with. 1985 was kinda late for a machine with a 40 column display if you wanted to do serious word processing.
[1] I think the best was a PDP-8 that had a printing terminal and two strange DEC terminals that were not VT-52 or VT-100s but instead supported both normal operation and a block mode similar to the IBM 3270. I hooked up one of those as the main terminal and had it catch on fire when I turned it on because it was choked with dust, we cleaned the other terminal carefully.
There's a Ukrainian couple who do YouTube videos about Soviet-era computers, especially PC compatibles. That's the defining characteristic of many of the featured computers: they're built like Cherno Alpha from Pacific Rim and look like they could withstand a freight train, but simultaneously flaky and failure prone.
Oops.
We ended up with two systems because the first one died along the way in 1983 or '84.
This brings back fond memories, including the desk my father built, which had a monitor stand and a cutout for the keyboard.
I feel lucky to this day that my parents invested in the Adam.
We went to a lot of shops in Montevideo. You could get anything you wanted.
We saw an Adam at one store. I had heard about the tape problems and also 8 bits were not so hot by then. I was quite surprised to find one; it really made me feel like Montevideo had everything.
I suggested an Amiga or an MSX (as a cheaper option) but in the end she got an Atari ST, which was the only micro we didn't see.
On an unrelated note, the short clip is funny as well.