Also received an ADAM Computer back in '84. I had to return part of it to Honeywell a couple of times before everything worked as it should. I played Dragon's Lair, Super Donkey Kong, Super Donkey Kong Jr., Super Zaxxon all on those data paks. Oh, and that Buck Rogers game as well, because that came with the system. I never used it for doing school reports because I felt that the printer quality was not that great. It didn't really compare to a nice electric typewriter (which we had at the time). Still have my system, but haven't hooked it all up for decades... Maybe I'll try some day...
This video made me sad. I got my Adam spring of 1084. It was the red box version that had a Colecovision with Expansion Module Adam. I used my Adam for all my book reports. I also taught myself BASIC from the manual over the summer of '84 between 11th and 12th grades. I used BASIC to do as much of my Algebra 3 and Trigonometry as possible. It taught me programming, and also made math work like another language for me. I have to admit, that was my best summer ever. I am 56 now, and wish I still had my Adam. It went belly up around 1998, and instead of having the foresight of mothballing it until I could fix it, I let it go because I had a Win98 machine and figured I would never need it again. Now, I long to have it back. Oh, most of the Adam stuff you showed was from CBS, wasn't that Europe and Canada?
Computers are what shifted the home video game market away from Atari, Coleco, Mattel, etc. People try to act like the market "crashed" in 1983, even though 1983 saw MORE video games sold than 1982 (a true crash in terms of revenue would be 1984, but that's another story). What really happened is that beginning in 1984 computers were getting more and more popular that their games began taking marketshare away from video game makers. The market didn't really crash, it shifted, and because computers didn't count toward video game sales, people say the video game market crashed, when in reality, it just shifted from the television consoles to the PC. Remember that game Oregon Trail? That was on PC, not a video game console. People old enough to remember 1984/1985 will know from experience that PC's is what became the biggest gaming trend back then. THAT is why Coleco (and Atari) tried their hands at making computers, only it was a new segment that neither was very skilled at.
I believe when I saw it at BEST or Toys R Us, they were selling off fading inventory for $199.00 with the coleco module. My parents didn’t have the money to buy it and I had an Atari 800xl but I will tell you, I really wanted it!
I was one of the unfortunate owners of the Adam. The cassette drive was the first thing to go, as it eventually crapped out and stopped loading the Buck Rogers pack-in game. When it did work, it was good for teaching the BASIC computer language and doing book reports and other typed assignments back when I was in school. It also had some kind of program for filing recipes that came in handy too. The cartridge games were faithful reproductions of the popular arcade games at the time. Centipede and Carnival were among my favorites. I still have all the old cassette and cartridge games, but the unit itself is long gone.
I still have a soft spot for Carnival on Colecovision. Does remind me of a remade version of Galaxian, but with a shooting gallery vibe to it. But yeah, after looking further into the Adam's history for this video, I was just shocked at how bad things got with it's release. But thanks for dropping by to share your personal story of owning one, great to see other people's experience with it back in the day! :)
I have the expansion module 3 that attaches to the colecovision game console. Got it a month back. Tape drive cooked but found another on ebay and it all works well. Just learning how to operate it etc. Looking forward to learning basic etc
Adam was so close. Softer promises with regards to ship date, and a little more time ironing out reliability issues, it really could have been a big deal.
My brother in law bought one of these. He had a Colecovision and when he heard the Adam was coming out its all he would talk about. He was an adult but was as happy as a young kid the day he called me up to come over and help him hook it up. He had scrimped, saved, and worked extra hours to buy this thing. It was just very sad to see his disappointment as it didnt take long for problems to show up. Fortunately I was able to hook him up with a Commodore 64 and 1541 drive.
While digging through my father's closests I found 2 boxes, 1 with all the manuals and another with the original adam computer and separate cartridge system and tons of games. Going to get it connected this coming week and see if it works. 🤞 wish me luck it works.
@@stephacdstreamero2190 video on how to fix is on youtube. Sega Genesis controllers work but you need the number pad from the coleco controller to select game difficulty etc
My parents got me a Colecovision for Christmas or my birthday. And my dad said that maybe down the road we would get a computer. He meant that maybe we would get the ADAM expansion. I ended up getting an Apple IIGS instead. No regrets there!
We had a Coleco Adam back in the day, my dad was a fan. In fact this past summer I found three of them in a storage room in his basement, and they all booted up and ran, but were then taken to an electronics recycler.
As a kid, I got an ADAM for Christmas. I was ecstatic- this I remember clearly. The only thing I remember about it was the cassette tape drives and playing Buck Rogers' Planet of Zoom. I also remember- being a stupid kid, totally disassembling it because I was curious how it worked. I didn't play Buck Rogers' Planet of Zoom again after that.
I think that was the thing for kids back then, that a lot of kids are curious about the insides of technology. That's why engineers always fascinated me when I was younger.
I have my Adam still,and it still works. It has great games (Buck Rogers, Dragon's Lair and more). I have games I made in BASIC too. Unfortunately if I play the games too much, I may lose them since the tapes "data paks" are getting oxygenated with age and destined to disintegrate some point soon
I have a Coleco Adam peripheral. Its still in the box. I have only bought it a few years ago just to collect it, but Idk how it works. If I could, I'd review it.
I owned a Adam Coleco Computer in the mid 80’s & I used a lot mainly for games to be honest.I sold the Computer in 1991 which I still regret to this day.And I had zero problems with the Adam Coleco Computer!
We had one growing up, highly doubt mom spent 799 on it. Once the games got old it pretty much just sat and collected dust, I was too young to realize it could play coleco games, all we had was Buck rogers, donkey kong, and a few other educational titles, I remember something about a monkey doing meth, ugh I mean math. May have used it to type up a school report a few times here or there. It got killed in a house fire... Insurance gave us enough for my first real PC though, a Packard Bell 486 w/ Windows 3.0, with a free upgrade to 3.1 via mailed diskettes, first discovered dialing BBS's. Then found a local BBS that offered internet through them. Then I was hooked, and installed AOL. Dammit. I feel so old now.
Oh the things you had to go through back then to turn your video game console into a computer! Today you can just hook a USB keyboard up to a Nintendo Switch with SmileBASIC to program on it! How far we’ve come!
I knew people who did quality c0ntrol on these at the plant in Amsterdam NY...they used to catch fire,, The Colecovision was a very memorable game system.
The ADAM was an awesome concept, (and a gread keyboard for a "home" system) The random access cassette system WAS cool, But it was also a weakness. There was no way for the average user to format normal tapes for it, so you could only get tapes from Coleco. It would have been better with a floppy drive. It HAD to be bundles with the printer..That's where the power supply lived!
A friend of mine and I rewrote the CP/M system on it to correct a few bugs and trash in it. Added like 11k of available disk space to the disk drives and about 7k more available memory. Only issue was, once you booted.to the new system, you couldn't read original disks. We did write a utility to transfer files from one disk to the other. I sold mine years ago, but if you're interested, I'd bet he still has a copy somewhere! He's still living in the same apartment in San Francisco he was back in the 80's. Have fun with Adam!
I know what you mean. I think I remember the Commodore 64 mini coming out and actually had some exclusive games that got re-released for it. There's so much content that came out during that era that it's very hard to say what's out there.
Ah! You youngsters don't know the joy of running an IBM (tm) PC, with a top of the line Hercules (mono) graphics card and a whopping 128K of memory on the motherboard! 360k floppy disc drives!
The Coleco Adam, it's the same as the ColecoVision but with the printer as the power supply, and combine that with a defective tape drive and low-budget build quality. (4:10)
"Too Innovative For Its Own Good" is certainly not how I'd characterize the Adam. It was a pretty decent system, had it not had the problems that it did, but it was not significantly more innovative than other 8-bit computers of that time. It was, as far as I know, the best computer that was developed from a game console that had already been released (and could be added it as an expansion), which is noteworthy, and its compatibility with the ColecoVision made it even more compelling, but it was still very hard to compete against the established 8-bit computers from the likes of Commodore, Atari, Apple, and Tandy.
Yea I had one 2nd hand and no problems what so ever short of the atari adapter was not working on it. I think was s great little think but out of my price range in 84 so I got a Commodore 64 for christmas 1985 and ran with it. Got my Adam in like 89ish from the Swap Shop. Loved the coleco games and played them more then use the Adam computer, but that was software as nothing wad available in the late 80s for it.still have the unitbinbthe attic I think
i will never forget christmas of 1984 as my 10 year old self sat there watching my dad trying to get our brand new adam hooked up and working i watched for hours as my father slowly lost his mind trying to get this piece of crap to work. lol
Also received an ADAM Computer back in '84. I had to return part of it to Honeywell a couple of times before everything worked as it should. I played Dragon's Lair, Super Donkey Kong, Super Donkey Kong Jr., Super Zaxxon all on those data paks. Oh, and that Buck Rogers game as well, because that came with the system. I never used it for doing school reports because I felt that the printer quality was not that great. It didn't really compare to a nice electric typewriter (which we had at the time). Still have my system, but haven't hooked it all up for decades... Maybe I'll try some day...
This video made me sad. I got my Adam spring of 1084. It was the red box version that had a Colecovision with Expansion Module Adam. I used my Adam for all my book reports. I also taught myself BASIC from the manual over the summer of '84 between 11th and 12th grades. I used BASIC to do as much of my Algebra 3 and Trigonometry as possible. It taught me programming, and also made math work like another language for me. I have to admit, that was my best summer ever. I am 56 now, and wish I still had my Adam. It went belly up around 1998, and instead of having the foresight of mothballing it until I could fix it, I let it go because I had a Win98 machine and figured I would never need it again. Now, I long to have it back. Oh, most of the Adam stuff you showed was from CBS, wasn't that Europe and Canada?
Computers are what shifted the home video game market away from Atari, Coleco, Mattel, etc. People try to act like the market "crashed" in 1983, even though 1983 saw MORE video games sold than 1982 (a true crash in terms of revenue would be 1984, but that's another story). What really happened is that beginning in 1984 computers were getting more and more popular that their games began taking marketshare away from video game makers. The market didn't really crash, it shifted, and because computers didn't count toward video game sales, people say the video game market crashed, when in reality, it just shifted from the television consoles to the PC. Remember that game Oregon Trail? That was on PC, not a video game console. People old enough to remember 1984/1985 will know from experience that PC's is what became the biggest gaming trend back then. THAT is why Coleco (and Atari) tried their hands at making computers, only it was a new segment that neither was very skilled at.
I believe when I saw it at BEST or Toys R Us, they were selling off fading inventory for $199.00 with the coleco module. My parents didn’t have the money to buy it and I had an Atari 800xl but I will tell you, I really wanted it!
I was one of the unfortunate owners of the Adam. The cassette drive was the first thing to go, as it eventually crapped out and stopped loading the Buck Rogers pack-in game. When it did work, it was good for teaching the BASIC computer language and doing book reports and other typed assignments back when I was in school. It also had some kind of program for filing recipes that came in handy too. The cartridge games were faithful reproductions of the popular arcade games at the time. Centipede and Carnival were among my favorites. I still have all the old cassette and cartridge games, but the unit itself is long gone.
I still have a soft spot for Carnival on Colecovision. Does remind me of a remade version of Galaxian, but with a shooting gallery vibe to it. But yeah, after looking further into the Adam's history for this video, I was just shocked at how bad things got with it's release. But thanks for dropping by to share your personal story of owning one, great to see other people's experience with it back in the day! :)
I have the expansion module 3 that attaches to the colecovision game console. Got it a month back. Tape drive cooked but found another on ebay and it all works well. Just learning how to operate it etc. Looking forward to learning basic etc
Adam was so close.
Softer promises with regards to ship date, and a little more time ironing out reliability issues, it really could have been a big deal.
Colecovision was awesome. It was also on the market until 84.
This video is about the coleco Adam. Not colecovision.
My brother in law bought one of these. He had a Colecovision and when he heard the Adam was coming out its all he would talk about. He was an adult but was as happy as a young kid the day he called me up to come over and help him hook it up. He had scrimped, saved, and worked extra hours to buy this thing. It was just very sad to see his disappointment as it didnt take long for problems to show up. Fortunately I was able to hook him up with a Commodore 64 and 1541 drive.
While digging through my father's closests I found 2 boxes, 1 with all the manuals and another with the original adam computer and separate cartridge system and tons of games. Going to get it connected this coming week and see if it works. 🤞 wish me luck it works.
Best of luck to you!
Good luck
Did it work? Hope you watched some videos for hints. Do not turn it on or off with a tape in the drive etc
@@Koexistence13 I fired up and but both controllers aren't functioning. Was hoping my daughter could start on it as it has loads of games.
@@stephacdstreamero2190 video on how to fix is on youtube. Sega Genesis controllers work but you need the number pad from the coleco controller to select game difficulty etc
My parents got me a Colecovision for Christmas or my birthday. And my dad said that maybe down the road we would get a computer.
He meant that maybe we would get the ADAM expansion. I ended up getting an Apple IIGS instead. No regrets there!
We had a Coleco Adam back in the day, my dad was a fan. In fact this past summer I found three of them in a storage room in his basement, and they all booted up and ran, but were then taken to an electronics recycler.
i had one, It survived until the 90s. It was fing loud when printing.
That's one thing I don't miss about modern printers now days, and don't take that long to print either lol
As a kid, I got an ADAM for Christmas. I was ecstatic- this I remember clearly. The only thing I remember about it was the cassette tape drives and playing Buck Rogers' Planet of Zoom. I also remember- being a stupid kid, totally disassembling it because I was curious how it worked. I didn't play Buck Rogers' Planet of Zoom again after that.
I think that was the thing for kids back then, that a lot of kids are curious about the insides of technology. That's why engineers always fascinated me when I was younger.
Getting back into the norm n catching up on vids, hope you're well. Take care
Hope things are well with you! But thank you for your continued support!
I have my Adam still,and it still works. It has great games (Buck Rogers, Dragon's Lair and more). I have games I made in BASIC too. Unfortunately if I play the games too much, I may lose them since the tapes "data paks" are getting oxygenated with age and destined to disintegrate some point soon
I have a Coleco Adam peripheral. Its still in the box. I have only bought it a few years ago just to collect it, but Idk how it works. If I could, I'd review it.
I owned a Adam Coleco Computer in the mid 80’s & I used a lot mainly for games to be honest.I sold the Computer in 1991 which I still regret to this day.And I had zero problems with the Adam Coleco Computer!
We had one growing up, highly doubt mom spent 799 on it. Once the games got old it pretty much just sat and collected dust, I was too young to realize it could play coleco games, all we had was Buck rogers, donkey kong, and a few other educational titles, I remember something about a monkey doing meth, ugh I mean math. May have used it to type up a school report a few times here or there. It got killed in a house fire... Insurance gave us enough for my first real PC though, a Packard Bell 486 w/ Windows 3.0, with a free upgrade to 3.1 via mailed diskettes, first discovered dialing BBS's. Then found a local BBS that offered internet through them. Then I was hooked, and installed AOL. Dammit. I feel so old now.
Oh the things you had to go through back then to turn your video game console into a computer! Today you can just hook a USB keyboard up to a Nintendo Switch with SmileBASIC to program on it! How far we’ve come!
coleco also made cabbage patch dolls!
Right you are. :)
I knew people who did quality c0ntrol on these at the plant in Amsterdam NY...they used to catch fire,, The Colecovision was a very memorable game system.
That must have been a fun week at work to see that happening. 😬
The ADAM was an awesome concept, (and a gread keyboard for a "home" system) The random access cassette system WAS cool, But it was also a weakness. There was no way for the average user to format normal tapes for it, so you could only get tapes from Coleco. It would have been better with a floppy drive. It HAD to be bundles with the printer..That's where the power supply lived!
My ADAM is still cruising along and the 2 disc drives work great!
A friend of mine and I rewrote the CP/M system on it to correct a few bugs and trash in it. Added like 11k of available disk space to the disk drives and about 7k more available memory.
Only issue was, once you booted.to the new system, you couldn't read original disks. We did write a utility to transfer files from one disk to the other.
I sold mine years ago, but if you're interested, I'd bet he still has a copy somewhere! He's still living in the same apartment in San Francisco he was back in the 80's.
Have fun with Adam!
That's unfortunate, it looked good and would've been a good contender against the other consoles. I've never heard of the Adam until now.
Whenever someone talks about these pre Win 95 PC's, I always wonder if there is some excellent exclusive locked away on it.
I know what you mean. I think I remember the Commodore 64 mini coming out and actually had some exclusive games that got re-released for it. There's so much content that came out during that era that it's very hard to say what's out there.
Ah! You youngsters don't know the joy of running an IBM (tm) PC, with a top of the line Hercules (mono) graphics card and a whopping 128K of memory on the motherboard! 360k floppy disc drives!
Great video and love the music selection. The subject is fascinating:)
Glad you enjoyed it!
I had an Adam computer with the Atri module. Lots of games. Paid $300.00 for it from Toys R Us.
3:10 ColecoVision was still being sold in 1984 and 1985 (production stopped in 1985).
Over 350 units sold or 350K sold?
350 seems a bit low. Great video
Very sorry for the audio issues for this video, but I'm sure I said around 350k units. But thank you for checking out the video! :)
Tandy (Radio Shack) sold computers, Coleco sold computers, Oddly both Tandy and Coleco began as LEATHER goods companies!
The Coleco Adam, it's the same as the ColecoVision but with the printer as the power supply, and combine that with a defective tape drive and low-budget build quality. (4:10)
"Too Innovative For Its Own Good" is certainly not how I'd characterize the Adam. It was a pretty decent system, had it not had the problems that it did, but it was not significantly more innovative than other 8-bit computers of that time. It was, as far as I know, the best computer that was developed from a game console that had already been released (and could be added it as an expansion), which is noteworthy, and its compatibility with the ColecoVision made it even more compelling, but it was still very hard to compete against the established 8-bit computers from the likes of Commodore, Atari, Apple, and Tandy.
Yea I had one 2nd hand and no problems what so ever short of the atari adapter was not working on it. I think was s great little think but out of my price range in 84 so I got a Commodore 64 for christmas 1985 and ran with it. Got my Adam in like 89ish from the Swap Shop. Loved the coleco games and played them more then use the Adam computer, but that was software as nothing wad available in the late 80s for it.still have the unitbinbthe attic I think
Nice!
Thank you! Cheers!
great video!
Glad you enjoyed it, thanks for checking it out.
As bad as this computer is I'd still love one
Even though I grew up as a Commodore 64 boy, I did admit seeing things like this made me and my family want one.
i will never forget christmas of 1984 as my 10 year old self sat there watching my dad trying to get our brand new adam hooked up and working i watched for hours as my father slowly lost his mind trying to get this piece of crap to work. lol