BILLW@SRI-AI.ARPA (11/29/83)
From: William "Chops" Westfield <BILLW@SRI-AI.ARPA>
a067 28-Nov-83 15:05
BC-COMPUTER-COLUMN
(ScienceTimes)
By ERIK SANDBERG-DIMENT
c.1983 N.Y. Times News Service
NEW YORK - As the conversation before our annual
Friday-after-Thanksgiving dinner turned to personal computers, the
new name ''Adam'' was heard more than others. So I suggested meeting
Adam, the new personal computer from Coleco Industries, awaited by
consumers for months in the expectation of high capability at a very
good price.
Leaving just one of our number to keep an eye on the roast, the rest
of us withdrew to the computer room, where the Adam had arrived the
day before Thanksgiving and was still in its shipping box. I left the
guests to tear into it. The results were particularly interesting in
that everything was up and running within five minutes, without a
hitch, or almost so.
The Adam comes with all the necessary hardware to start it up,
including a three-pronged plug adapter (except in Canada, where it's
illegal) and pictorial instructions on how to ground the wire if your
house has the older two-prong electrical system. It's a small feature
- but probably few things could be more frustrating for a child than
to find a huge 2-by-3-foot silver box filled with potential
electronic excitement under the Christmas tree and not be able to
plug it in. The only thing worse, perhaps, would be plugging it in
successfully and then discovering that no software to speak of was
available to run on the machine.
Once the printer, computer, keyboard, game controller and television
receivers were all tied together by their various rubber-encased
umbilical cords, the computer leaped into life, presenting the start
screen for the Adam's Electronic Typewriter. But the clarity was
terrible. The letter ''M'' was totally undecipherable apart from the
context of the word ''Adam'' itself, and everything was distorted and
color-smeared.
One of us who knew more about video than the rest by virtue of being
in the technical end of television production removed the 15-foot
cable connecting the computer to the television set and substituted
one a foot and a half long from my scrap pile of surplus parts.
Voila! The picture became as clear as that of any home computer on
the market that uses a television screen for display. In fact, it was
better than most. Adam users who don't have a handy scrap heap of
cables can accomplish the same thing by bundling all the extra wire
tightly together; otherwise the loose flapping wire acts like a
television antenna, picking up interference.
Coleco expects that students will use Adam's built-in word
processing system, the Smart Writer, for their homework. Besides, the
system's integral letter-quality printer allows game players to have
a proof-of-the-pudding printout of their high scores to lug with them
to school. Perhaps these Hall-of-Fame screens will someday become as
essential a part of a boy's pocket paraphernalia as baseball cards.
Whatever the case, parents will probably be longing for earplugs
once the children start requesting printouts. The machine is,
frankly, noisy.
For professional word processing, furthermore, the Adam prints too
slowly for comfort. Since Coleco is sponsoring the development of
third-party hardware and software, encouraging other companies to
manufacture Adam-compatible products, perhaps someone will come up
with a printer buffer for this computer. Such an accessory would
allow the user to ''dump'' finished copy into the buffer and continue
word processing while the printer took its own sweet time getting it
all on paper.
Beneath these problems and a somewhat stiff keyboard, which would
slow down a good typist, lies a rather good, if limited, word
processing system. And because the word processing software is built
in, you can switch back and forth from it to a program on one of the
data packs, specialized high-speed tape cassettes, that the Adam uses
instead of the more familiar disks for storing programs and data. If
you use the Basic data pack to develop a program, for instance, you
can at the same time use word processing software to do the actual
writing and editing. The same will hold true for data base management
systems soon to be released by the company. Again, however, one
wonders who at home is really going to use a data base management
system for such tasks as organizing Christmas card lists and personal
telephone books.
At the moment, the Adam looks like a lot of machine for the money
with one big qualification: Will there be enough software for it? All
there is for Christmas is the Basic and the Super Game packs
accompanying the machine. Mark Yoseloff, a vice president of Coleco,
responded to this problem by saying that Coleco is doing all it can
to assure that other firms will be releasing their software for the
Adam. High on the list of companies already committed to this task
are Spinnaker, Broderbund, Sierra On-Line and Infocom, all of which
are producers of some of the most popular home and game software
packages around. In addition, Softsync expects to have its Computer
Mechanic auto maintenance software ready for the Adam by early
December, with Personal Accountant and other programs to follow soon
thereafter.
Meanwhile, the Adam exists as a complete home computer system,
without television, for $650, which is hardly more than a
letter-quality printer alone normally costs. It may turn out to be
the Volkswagen of home computers - or the Edsel. Only the future
software will tell.
nyt-11-28-83 1756est
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