When the Coleco Adam was announced in June 1983, it must have sounded like a brilliant idea: a proper 8-bit home micro that was fully compatible with the successful ColecoVision console. Well, apparently and due to some pretty weird design choices and hardware flaws, the plan just didn't work. The Adam sold poorly and eventually dragged Coleco down with it, which is frankly a shame. This is after all a unique, beautiful and rather versatile machine and -as you might have expected- a pretty rare one too. You can find out more about the Adam here, here and here.
Now, for a truly rare chance to grab a Coleco Adam computer in a fully working, tested and seemingly excellent condition, you should have a look at this Coleco Adam lot that appeared on eBay. You'll be biding on a Colecovision Adam Computer System with three disk drives, a Colecovision Smart Writer Printer, a keyboard, a modem, two cartridges (Super Action Football, Super Action Baseball), two joysticks, two paddles, a ton of floppies and game tapes, manuals, guides, CP/M, an assembler and even some dust covers. Seller ships only to US addresses.
Posts
It certainly is a shame that the Adam dragged Coleco down. The Colecovision was far more powerful than either the rival Atari 2600 or Mattel Intellivision and boasted some excellent arcade conversions. Atari & Mattel were so fixated on each other that Coleco snuck in under the radar and beat both to the licence to Nintendo's Donkey Kong.
ReplyDeleteIt's well known that Universal Pictures took Nintendo to court over the similarities to King Kong (a case which Nintendo eventually won), but Coleco had decided to settle with Universal and had to pay a royalty of 3% on every copy of Donkey Kong for the Colecovision they sold.
It really never ceases to amaze me how such truly trivial technicalities can be of the utmost business importance. It's a demented world, it is.
ReplyDelete