A security Slack community that I am a part of recently had a discussion about how members got into cybersecurity as a profession. There was a wide variety of stories, and many of them were far more interesting than my own. The topic got me thinking about another, related story: that of how I got into technology in the first place. In this series, I’ll be sharing some of the major tech milestones in my life, starting with the first computer my family owned: the Coleco Adam.
The Coleco Adam doesn’t seem to be particularly well-known today. The Coleco company was a toy company best known for Cabbage Patch Kids, but like a lot of toy companies in the early 80s, it was looking to expand into the relatively new video game craze that was at the time dominated by Atari. Joining other toy companies like Mattel, it jumped into the electronics game business and never looked back.
ColecoVision
After releasing a few handheld games like Electronic Quarterback, Coleco released the ColecoVision video game system, which was more powerful than the Atari 2600 that was the market leader. We had a ColecoVision, and played lots of fun games including Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. (fun fact: it’s the only Mario universe game where Mario is a villain), LadyBug, Frogger, and Q*Bert to name a few. It was a solid console that proved to be pretty popular.
Enter the Coleco Adam
From that success, Coleco then went on to announce a computer bundle including the CPU, keyboard, joysticks, and a daisy-wheel printer as a complete set. This was priced very competitively compared to similar bundles from IBM or Commodore, but it was very much an over-promise: Coleco couldn’t deliver at the price they announced, and they kept missing shipping dates. Nevertheless, my family eventually got one in late 1983 or early 1984, and it had the same quality problems almost all of the early Adam’s had. As a result, we had to exchange it for another model. Despite the roadbumps, it became a very useful tool and the computer I learned to program on.
The Adam had a Z80 processor and ran a version of Basic called SmartBASIC. It was similar to, although not 100% compatible with, Applesoft Basic, which led to some frustration when type-in programs failed to work: straight Basic programs usually were fine, but anything that used PEEK and POKE commands would fail due to the different memory layouts between Apple and Adam.
SmartBASIC had a rudimentary manual, and using it I started to learn about programming concepts such as loops, input, comparisons, and the infamous GOTO statement. That’s not to say I was good at it. I remember creating a program to paint the screen blue, which would have been easy with some PLOT commands and a FOR loop, but I didn’t quite grok how loops worked, and so I wrote one statement per line to color in manually. What a fantastic waste of time that was! I’d also check out books from the library full of type-in programs, and tried to get them to work. More often than not, they wouldn’t, and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
We also had a couple of cassettes with various games on them, such as Hangman or Jot, which were pretty fun. There was a graphing program that I could never quite get to work, but it was supposed to be able to graph math formulas on screen. The Adam was also basically a ColecoVision, so you could play all the same cartridges on it.
The Adam didn’t have Basic in ROM like most computers. Instead, it had a Word Processor in ROM, so when you first turned it on that’s where you started. I remember some attempts to write books using that word processor, none of which got beyond a few pages. We did make ASCII art using the incredibly loud daisy-wheel printer, and that was pretty cool; I remember making ASCII art of the Space Shuttle that I was particularly proud of.
Coleco Gives Up
The fact that the ADAM didn’t have Basic in ROM proved to be its demise. Unfortunately, the specialized cassettes that had SmartBASIC and other apps on them were pretty fragile, and even worse, leaving them in the computer tended to nuke the contents due to the huge magnetic pulse generated when you turned the computer on. After a few years, the SmartBASIC cassette failed, and I could no longer program. Finding another cartridge was pretty much out of the question too. The Adam itself was a dead product by that point: in 1985, it ceased production. No longer being able to get any support, we stopped using it.
Despite the fact that Coleco stopped making them, a very die-hard group of users still exists. If you are feeling particularly nostalgic, you can go to ColecoADAM.net to see what’s happening in Adam world these days or check out old newsletters, like AUGment which we used to get. There are also countless emulators out there if you want to try them out.
The Adam wasn’t my only exposure to computing at the time. My elementary school had a few Commodore 64 computers that we were able to use, and I did some programming with them as well. However, it would be a few years before I had a computer at home that I could use, and that will be the subject of the next part of this series.
3 comments