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Introduced | June 1983 |
Discontinued | January 1985 |
Release Price | $750.00 |
How would I
describe the Coleco Adam? I guess I would
describe it as the computer that could have been. What
does this mean? Well, when the Adam was introduced I was
impressed. At the time I owned a Commodore 64 and read
the reviews and my reaction was, WOW! Here was a computer
with a faster processor, more RAM, a built in word
processor, a printer, and a built in data storage device.
All for about $750! The more I read the more I liked it.
It had it all, but something went wrong. Because within a
very short period of time it was gone. A victim of the
computer wars of the mid 80's. The Adam was not without
its flaws, some of the most glaring were quirky data tape
storage device which had a bad habit of erasing the data
tapes left in the drive at start-up or shut-down and a sloo-o-w printer (10 characters per second). But these were
really just growing pains that any new computer line
experiences mostly caused by rushing the computer to
market. A number of reasons can
be attributed to the demise of the Adam. First Coleco was
first and foremost a game company and a relatively
newcomer to that arena to boot. The 8 bit home computer
market in 1983-84 was a very volatile market, with even
long established computer manufacturers struggling to
survive. I think Coleco wanted to try to capitalize on the installed base of ColecoVision game consoles popularity to grab a niche in the home computer market. What they did not count on was the bottom dropping out of the video game market in 1983. This was primarily brought on by the saturation of the videogame market and the blurring of the lines between dedicated game consoles and low cost computers marketed by Radio Shack, Atari, and Commodore. In 1983 it seemed everyone was manufacturing software cartridges for the videogame console industry. Some were very good but most were very cheap unimaginative games. Soon the market was flooded with repetitive and boring games . With the prices of the home computers now dropping to the levels of the game consoles, the decision became clear which system would get the consumer's dollars. Besides for the kids, it suddenly became 'cool' to own a computer and the old game consoles were relegated to the closets and attics. It was as if the videogame industry just vanished overnight, almost taking companies like Coleco, Mattel, and Atari with it. It would be 3 years before another dedicated videogame console would again surface to capture the interest of the American consumer. The manufacturer was Nintendo and the game console was the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) released in the USA in 1986. Without the financial stability supplied by the
ColecoVision game console the Adam was not going to get
the time it needed to establish enough of an installed
base of support to survive in the cut-throat market that
the home computer business had become. The
Adam had flaws, but
so did every other computer system initially. The Adam
just didn't have time to fix them. Coleco was in
financial difficulty and could ill afford to spend a lot
of time and money to fix its new computer. Nor could they
afford to bring to market all of the promised
peripherals. So without the financial support it needed
the Adam ( a computer that could have been a great one! )
faded into oblivion in just two and one half years after
its introduction. In January of 1985 Coleco threw in the
towel and got out of the computer business. The Adam was a great machine.
It contained a Zilog Z80A processor running at 3.58 MHz.
and had 80 kilobytes of RAM built in, although 16
kilobytes were dedicated to video and could not be
accessed by the processor directly. The computer came as
a bundled system. The first of 3 main parts included in
the system are the console, which houses the motherboard,
main processor and memory, a digital data pack drive, and
the expansion interfaces. The second is the daisy wheel
printer that also serves as the power supply for the
entire computer. Third is the keyboard with 75 full
travel keys. The Adams peripherals are connected
to the main unit by means of a network called Adamnet.
The peripherals connected to the Adam are called smart
peripherals because each has its own 6801 microprocessor.
This allows the peripherals to act independently of the
main Z80A processor and not use resources or tie up the
processor during cassette loads and printing operations. The Adam comes with a copy of
SmartBASIC on a digital data tape. Coleco claimed that
SmartBASIC is compatible with the ApplesoftBASIC which
was written by Microsoft. The printer included with the
Adam is a letter quality daisy wheel type. It is slow
printing only 10 cps (characters per second). It uses a
standard 96 character plastic wheel, and the ribbon is a
standard Diablo Hytype I or Xerox 800. The keyboard is attached to
the console with a coiled wire with standard modular
phone connectors on either end. It has 75 full-travel
keys arranged in a standard qwerty configuration.
It included six special function keys to be used with the
built in word processor. What's that? Yes I said built
in word processor. The Adam has a complete full featured
word processor burned into it's ROM. In fact, thats
what it defaults to when you boot the computer before you
load the BASIC or any other program.
This was one of the main selling points of the Adam. It
was a complete system in a time when computer
manufacturers were selling their base computers,
sometimes below cost, to snag consumers and selling high
priced peripherals to make the systems usable. A usable
system from Coleco was all included in one box for one
price. |
System Architecture | Ports | Data Storage | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Memory | Video and Graphics | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Physical Specs. | Software | Power | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Sound | Keyboard Specs. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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