Coleco ADAM computer platform

Hardware theme

Promised as an add-on for the Colecovision but turned out to be impractical. Coleco fulfilled their promise anyhow before making stand-alone ADAMs.

[WIP]
The ADAM is a full computer, with a printer, external and internal drives and lots of memory, The ADAM also differers from the Colecovision in many ways. It has a keyboard, the printer is part of the computer, it has special cartridges that will not run on the Colecovision. Finally most games come on a special cassette or 5¼ disk, and are not compatible with the Colecovision.

For most every day tasks, an ADAM actually beats an Apple][e (industry benchmarks). A demo application for the system shows 4 text windows running independent tasks and in another an animated textured 3D polygon rotates and bounces around in one window (albeit in binary color) while text is being scrolled in another. This may not be not impressive now, but doing this with 1983 technology is quite impressive. However, Coleco never widely advertised the ADAM's advantages. They started bad with their surprise Donkey Kong conversion that was probably not a violation of their licensing agreement with Nintendo but they should have discussed it with Nintendo first (this surprise put Nintendo in a bad position in it's already shaky negotiations with Atari, which fell apart eventually). Further self-sabotage resulted from promising and alarming rate of 100,000 units shipped by Christmas when after they had only a partially working prototype in June. Sadly, they delivered on this promise and as many as 5 in 6 ADAMS shipped in a non-functional state. Although Coleco claimed only 1 in 10 had defects and this was acceptable as being "well below industry standards". Customers as well as stockholders were enraged. At such a low cost ($600 including drives, printer, everything at a time when similar quality printers alone cost more than $600), high rate of defective systems, and lack of information, consumers were left to assume the ADAM was an inferior platform to other computers. About this time, the video game market crashed. Computers, and computer games went right on growing, but home consoles were deemed dead by 1984. The crash and ADAM cost Coleco $35 million in 2 years. Other companies had dumped many times that into their new computers and consoles, but enjoyed decent reputations to carry them through to profitability. The press advised consumers that the ADAM launch was rushed and to wait for Coleco to fix the problems. Coleco reduced the price, added a scholarship for each new customer, wrote a new user manual (they blamed the original manual for everything), and hired Ketchum Advertising to repair the Adam's reputation. Many loyal consumers waited for real fixes to come. Ketchum Advertising, with many new staff hired for the task ahead, were all set to start on January 2, 1985 when they read Coleco's announced fix in the New York Times; Coleco would be discontinuing the ADAM and support for it. Many major companies and minor ones saw enough potential in the 100,000 or so ADAMs in the wild that they picked up support for the orphaned PC. The ADAM has seen new quality purchasable hardware and software every year since 1985 (as of 2016). However, ADAM developers and users did not sit quietly in response to Coleco's abandonment. Coleco ended up providing very limited support. Mostly in the form of providing files, code, and technical documents for devs and users to decipher.

Games by year

The first Coleco ADAM computer platform video game was released in 1982.