Christmas 1983 was a great occasion. It was the year our family bought their first home computer. Several models were available on the market, the main ones being the personal computers Commodore 64 and Vic-20, Texas Instruments Ti-99/4A , Radio TRS-80s, and Apple IIe. However, our family took the opportunity of a new choice: Coleco ADAM.
Coleco Adam offered some advantages over his rivals. As a complete system, the printer includes a daisy wheel, an integrated high-speed engine drive, a built-in Colecovision game console, and joysticks. It also came with a built in word processor and could work as an author. The whole system sold for about $600. While this was more than its competitors, if you were to buy other computers and all the accessories that were standard on the Coleco ADAM, the entire home computer was quite competitive in price. ADAM came in a great big box, but the box had everything you needed.
Even the Coleco ADAM had a pretty good processing unit by 1983 standards. It had a Zilog Z80-A processor running at 3.58 Mhz and 80k of RAM (64K of which was available to users). Also hooked directly to the television just like a video game system. We don’t need a monitor. The high speed of the machine was required on special tapes and was slower than a floppy drive, but it ran much faster than the tape recorders that loaded many other financial systems. ADAM’s collection was plagued by delays and cancellations. I think our Adam arrived in time for Christmas, but he stayed well for a few weeks.
The Colecovision game system was one of the most popular video game systems of the era. I thought it would be more like a built-in console system. Although game cartridges were not in the family IT budget . This was probably an advantage that forced him to learn basic programming. Adam’s SmartBASIC compiler was loaded into memory via a tape drive and was compatible with the popular Apple BASIC language. I remember making a pretty cool turn-based game where you can hunt and drop depth charges from submarines. and the guided submarines shoot torpedoes at you.
Ultimately, the main selling point was that the daisy wheel printer produced much more professional looking documents than the dot matrix printers that were so common with rival computer systems. Documents produced by Coleco ADAM are drawn from an electronic reporter. I saw dot matrix documents as draft documents. We wanted a primrose wheel printer so that my good high school and my father’s resume would look good.
After Coleco Adam left, I actually bought a second unit to take to college. IBM PC computers in the university computer labs in 1986. Since 1990, Coleco ADAM in our family has been completely replaced by IBM-compatible PC computers. Although we found many drawbacks to the Coleco ADAM, if the box and system weren’t so heavy, I would love to have another one for my vintage computer collection.
Sources:
I collect Adam. oldcomputers.net
I collect Adam. old-computers.com
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