1983 · Toy-Maker's Family Computer · Work 984 of 1,871
A living room in a suburb in Connecticut on Christmas morning, on a beige carpet among torn red and green wrapping paper a home computer system of cream-white plastic, a wide printer with a blank white sheet curled around its roller, a flat unit with two smoky-glass tape slots at the front, a plain black strip along each front, a keyboard with cream, beige and brown keys and a row of dark keys along the top, at its right end a black hand controller with a small knob, every key plain, smooth and unmarked, a hand pushing a dark tape cassette into one slot, a decorated tree with coloured lights.
What it was used for
A toy maker's complete package, 1983, at 750 dollars: keyboard, daisy-wheel printer, two joysticks and three cassettes holding SmartBASIC, a pre-formatted blank tape and a game. Z80A at 3.58 MHz, 80 KB of memory expandable to 144 KB, one tape drive holding 256 KB per cassette, a second for 200 dollars. A variant, Expansion Module 3, turned an already-owned ColecoVision games console into a computer. Coleco's 1984 sales were nearly 800 million dollars, mostly toys; the Cabbage Patch Kids alone brought in 500 million (UPI).
What was new
What marks it is the bundling: computer, keyboard, printer, word processor and games in one box — and a version that upgraded the console the buyer already owned instead of replacing it. The price of that sat in the construction. According to Austin Modine (The Register, 2008) the printer held the system's only power supply, so a printer fault stopped everything; he further writes that the machine emitted a pulse at switch-on that erased tapes in or near it, and that 60 percent of Adams sold were returned as defective. In January 1985 Coleco wound the Adam down; analysts put the write-off, per UPI, at up to 100 million dollars.
What the sources leave open: The 60-percent return rate and the erasing pulse appear in Austin Modine's piece without a cited source; no contemporary confirmation was found. The UPI report of 7 January 1985 gives no unit figures and expressly labels the size of the write-off an analysts' estimate.