[HN Gopher] The Coleco Adam Computer
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The Coleco Adam Computer
Author : rbanffy
Score : 36 points
Date : 2025-06-06 10:25 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dfarq.homeip.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dfarq.homeip.net)
| jgneff wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this is the computer that my mom had hooked up to
| an old TV set back in the early 90s. She used it all the time to
| communicate with me by e-mail, printing out each message she
| received. I always knew a message was from her because the text
| was wrapped at something like 25 columns in width. It worked
| great! It was like a fancy typewriter.
|
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > 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."
| cogogo wrote:
| My father bought one of these before I was old enough to
| remember. He returned at least two defective units - the tape
| drives - before he threw in the towel. Eventually our first
| computer was the Apple IIc which we still have.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "if you had [a data pack] in or near the drive when you turned
| the system on, the magnetic field would erase the tape inside."
|
| Oops.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I actually had one of these. I went to a small school and found
| an ADAM computer in a box in a closet one day and asked my
| teachers about it.
|
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > only for my stepdad to throw a hissy
|
| Please tell me he didn't live.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| My childhood would have been far better if he hadn't.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I was joking, but I'm very sorry to hear that. :-(
|
| Life shouldn't be hard.
| stilldavid wrote:
| The Coleco Adam was my first computer. I was too young to
| appreciate it other than the hours spent playing _Pitfall_, but
| those are fond memories indeed.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| A classmate in elementary school lusted after the Adam. He had a
| Colecovision so I guess he was a bit narrowly focused on that
| world. As his family moved away, I don't know if he ever got one
| but years later a family friend handed one down to me. It was
| obsolete but I had fun taking it apart. It was a bit of a tank,
| which is funny considering how unreliable it was. Probably would
| have been wiser to keep it intact to use the daisy wheel printer
| for school papers instead of the lower print quality Gemini-10
| dot matrix our daily use computer had.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| I had a friend with one. I was fascinated by the high speed
| cassette drives - they had direct drive motors, more like 1970s
| minicomputer cassette tech than like other home computers. They
| were the ultimate refinement of an obsolete technology.
| barney54 wrote:
| This was first computer. I didn't use it much for anything other
| than playing games, but those were great!
| VonGuard wrote:
| Some of what I am about to say is highlighted in this article but
| I think it should be restated:
|
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > The Adam came with a dot matrix printer.
|
| 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.
| euroderf wrote:
| Daisy wheel printers were so cool. Is anyone making them
| anymore ?
| rbanffy wrote:
| I don't think so. Dot matrix covers the niches where impact
| printers make sense and laser and inkjets cover those where
| they don't. There might be someone making typewriters, but
| I don't think any of those can be (easily) used as a
| printer.
|
| I'm looking into converting one into a teletype by doing a
| MITM between keyboard and logic board.
| thought_alarm wrote:
| Sorry, but none of this correct.
|
| 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.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| > Sequential data transfer rates are faster than the C64 disk
| drive
|
| 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.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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
| flomo wrote:
| Adam was mostly interesting in terms of marketing. The Atari 5200
| was based on the 400/800 computer, but was intentionally made
| incompatible. Meanwhile, Coleco heavily advertised the 'computer
| expansion unit (coming soon)' as a way to upgrade your
| ColecoVision to a real computer. But by the time Adam finally
| shipped, the weirdo data cassettes and price made it pretty
| unappealing, and the ColecoVision was practically dead at that
| point anyway.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The new physics teacher at my high school in the late 1990s
| helped us start a computer club which, among other things,
| collected obsolete computers [1]
|
| 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.
| devnull3 wrote:
| Fun fact: The computer in simpsons is a coleco [1].
|
| On an unrelated note, the short clip is funny as well.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/av4lbel9aIo?t=7
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(page generated 2025-06-06 23:01 UTC)