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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.

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 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  Daisy wheel printers were so cool. Is anyone making them anymore ?
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    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.
    - euroderf 1y ago
      Dot matrix printouts tend towards crap. Daisy wheels made crispness achievable and evoked the Selectric. My 0,02€.
- drewcoo 1y ago
  >> Back then, using audio tapes to hold data was revolutionary, in terms of storage space and price. > Those aren't ordinary cassettes Years earlier, my Color Computer (from that other leather company, Tandy) was reading and writing to ordinary cassettes (also sold by Radio Shack). The folks I knew who could afford Apple IIs had the cash to spend on floppy drives but I think their computers supported cassettes. I had friends in pre-Adam days who had Commodores and one with a TI-99, all of which had plain old cassette storage, too. In the 70s-80s that was slow but affordable. This was anything but revolutionary for the Adam.
thought_alarm 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jyt2u78qAFs

rbanffy 1y ago

> 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 1y ago
Daisy wheel printers were so cool. Is anyone making them anymore ?
- rbanffy 1y ago
  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.
  - euroderf 1y ago
    Dot matrix printouts tend towards crap. Daisy wheels made crispness achievable and evoked the Selectric. My 0,02€.
drewcoo 1y ago
>> Back then, using audio tapes to hold data was revolutionary, in terms of storage space and price. > Those aren't ordinary cassettes Years earlier, my Color Computer (from that other leather company, Tandy) was reading and writing to ordinary cassettes (also sold by Radio Shack). The folks I knew who could afford Apple IIs had the cash to spend on floppy drives but I think their computers supported cassettes. I had friends in pre-Adam days who had Commodores and one with a TI-99, all of which had plain old cassette storage, too. In the 70s-80s that was slow but affordable. This was anything but revolutionary for the Adam.

thought_alarm 1y ago

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 1y ago
> 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 1y ago

> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jyt2u78qAFs