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Home > Archive > Sony playstation2 > August 2006 > The Adam Effect: When a maker of a console prices themselves out of the marketplace...
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The Adam Effect: When a maker of a console prices themselves out of the marketplace...
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| getrich@1upandup.com 2006-08-26, 7:32 pm |
| The Coleco Adam was a computer that priced itself right out of the
market. It was promised to supposedly be the next big thing riding the
coattails of the Colecovision. Well, it had production problems, and
was too costly, and Coleco got buried under production costs and
eventually it got discontinued, and the company went under. Coleco was
actually a hot and rising company when the Colecovision was released.
It had the Cabbage Patch doll and lined up a bunch of hot arcade
titles.
Oh I have been seeing the term "Dreamcast Effect" thrown around. The
"Adam Effect" is a distinct possibility also.
Anyhow, articles on the Adam:
http://oldcomputers.net/adam.html
http://oldcomputers.net/popsciadam.html
Well, actually looking at the price of the Adam, a PS3 isn't that bad
pricewise today.
- Richard Hutnik
Other consoles that had the Adam Effect:
3DO
Neo-Geo
CD-I
Lynx
Master System (USA)
Saturn (at first)
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| Jordan 2006-08-27, 7:33 pm |
| getrich@1upandup.com wrote:
quote:
> Anyhow, articles on the Adam:
> http://oldcomputers.net/adam.html
> http://oldcomputers.net/popsciadam.html
Both of those return a 404. Here's one that works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleco_Adam
Here's what killed the Adam:
It was $725 in 1983. In adjusted dollars that would be equivalent to
$1384.90 in 2005 dollars (couldn't find a calculator for 2006).
Meanwhile, the Commodore 64 had been out for a while and could be had
for as little as $200 ($382.04 in 2005 dollars.)
Aother Adam problems:
* Adam generated a surge of electromagnetic energy on startup, which
would erase the contents of any removable media left in or near the
drive. Making this problem worse, some of the Coleco manuals instructed
the user to put the tape in the drive before turning the computer on;
presumably these were printed before the issue was known.
* Initial shipments to customers included a high rate of defective tape
drives, perhaps up to 50%.
* Since Coleco made the unusual decision of using the printer to supply
power to the entire Adam system, if the printer broke, none of the
system worked.
* Advanced or commercial software for the Apple II was incompatible,
because the internal architectures and operating systems of the two
systems differed greatly.
* Unlike other home computers at the time, the Adam did not have its
BASIC interpreter permanently stored in ROM. Instead, it featured a
built-in electronic typewriter and word processor, SmartWriter, as well
as the Elementary Operating System (EOS) OS kernel and the 8K OS-7
ColecoVision operating system. The SmartBASIC interpreter was delivered
on a proprietary format Digital Data Pack tape cassette.
* Once put into Word Processor mode, SmartWriter could not get back
into the typewriter mode without rebooting the system.
* Adam's Digital Data Pack drives, although faster and of higher
capacity than the audio cassette drives used for competing computers,
were less reliable and still not as fast as a floppy disk drive. Coleco
eventually shipped a 160K 5=BC inch disk drive for it.
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