Coleco Adam - Problems

Problems

The Adam was not without weaknesses:

  • The Adam generates a surge of electromagnetic energy on startup, which can 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, some say up to 50%. Ejecting a tape while it was moving would usually destroy the drive as there was no eject lock-out mechanism and the tape (based on a standard Compact Cassette) moved at an extremely high speed.
  • Since Coleco made the unusual decision of using the printer to supply power to the entire Adam system, if the printer's electronics failed or the printer was missing, none of the system worked.
  • 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 8kB 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 the system being rebooted.
  • The 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 5ΒΌ inch disk drive for it.

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