Ah, finally, "The first, complete, single-package family computer that includes all necessary hardware and software",
at least in Coleco's eyes.
Released in October 1983, the Adam was available in two versions, as an add-on to the very popular ColecoVision game system,
or as a stand-alone home computer system, as seen above.
At $600, the Adam was a great deal, including a letter-quality printer, high speed built-in storage, and 64K of user RAM.
Data storage is via built-in cassette drives. Ordinary audio cassettes cannot be used, they are not of sufficient quality to
reliably store computer data.
Coleco sold high quality tapes specifically made for the Adam, capable of withstanding the high-speed
20 ips (inches per second) read/write and 80 ips rewind speeds.
SmartBASIC is one of many applications and games available on "Adam High Speed Digital Data Pack".
The Adam also has a cartridge slot on top to accept and play all ColecoVision game cartridges.
Although the Adam has a high-speed serial bus specifically for Adam peripherals, it has no standard serial or parallel ports for printers, modems,
and other standard peripherals.
The included daisy-wheel printer is very noisy and slow, printing about 10 characters per second, but it has much better print quality
than any dot-matrix printer, a cheaper and more common printer of the 1980's.
The daisy-wheel printer has a spinning disk, or daisy-wheel, with all of the printable characters on the outer edge.
If the printer is told to print the letter "a", it spins the daisy-wheel until the character "a" is at the top, then hits it
with a striker, imprinting the "a" on the paper, similar to a typewriter.
The printer continues to spin and strike the daisy-wheel until all the appropriate text has been printed. The printer has to
know where all of the characters are located on the daisy-wheel, otherwise it wouldn't know when to strike it. Because of this,
it is probably best to use a daisy-wheel supplied by Coleco, although many other daisy-wheels have nearly the same character layout
for standardization.
Here is an example of the Adam daisy-wheel print quality:
The printer is connected to the Adam console via the AdamNet, a 62.5K bps, half-duplex, shared serial bus. Can you run
the Adam without the printer? No - the printer contains the power supply for the entire system, so it must always be
hooked-up and turned on.
After the Adam was released in October 1983, Coleco had to cease distribution of the Adam and fix the printer,
which was having reliability problems. Because of this, Coleco missed the 1983 Christmas buying season,
a major disappointement and loss of revenue.
By the time they got the Adam fixed and were shipping again, people believed that it was an unreliable system,
and shyed away from it.
Coleco stopped shipping systems in January 1985, after only one year.
Some of the Adam's interesting features:
There is no operating system built-in, just a word processor. You can load the SmartBASIC programming
language (included) from cassette tape.
One or two built-in digital cassette drives transfer data at 19.2K baud, storing 256K bytes of data per tape.
The letter-quality Adam daisy-wheel printer is required, as it contains the power supply for the rest of the system.
The Adam is compatible with all ColecoVision game cartridges.
Keep the Data Packs (cassettes) away from the printer! And turning the Adam on/off with a Data Pack in the drive
may cause data loss!
In September 1983, Popular Science magazine published an article about the
Adam computer, having just been previewed at the 1983 Chicago CES (Consumer Electronics Show).
The funniest thing about the Adam computer is the single box which everything came in - it's giant! 10 X 20 X 40 inches
and 35 pounds. Basketball not included.
Data storage is via built-in cassette drives. Ordinary audio cassettes cannot be used, they are not of sufficient quality to
reliably store computer data.
Coleco stopped shipping systems in January 1985, after only one year.
