ech@pyuxll.UUCP (Ned Horvath) (11/07/83)
The following is a log of my experiences with an ADAM. The short review is: If this package at this price sounds too good to be true, your intuition is right on the mark: 'taint true. Perhaps I got a lemon, but if I did it was a thorough-going lemon. Details: afternoon, Thursday 11/3: picked up the machine at a Consumer's Distributing. evening: read all the documentation cover to cover. The BASIC manual is very poorly written and pretty sketchy, so have a Microsoft/Apple BASIC manual near to hand to interpolate with. Midnight: I can either go to bed or hook it up. Obvious choice, I can sleep anytime. The setup is straightforward and simple, I turn it on, and play with the "electric typewriter" mode a bit (this is the boot state), kick in the "word processor" mode (this is in ROM and comes up very fast). This gets boring (and VERY noisy!) very fast, so... 1am: load up the BASIC "datapack" (no, BASIC is NOT in ROM and, despite what you might assume from the glossies, there is only ONE drive, the other is simply an empty window). The datapacks are so-called stringy-floppies, aka carefully engineered high-speed cassettes. I play with a few simple programs, store them on tape, try reboots + reload + run...not bad! 3am: by this time it is becoming apparent that the whole system has some heat dissipation problems. The printer box (which is what plugs into the wall and has the main power supply) is getting very warm indeed. The Cassettes are also warm to the touch when removed, especially near the head: this may be frictional heating. 4am: Experiencing a lot of difficulties with the tape: obviously there is a lot of error-retry going on. 5am: Can't even boot the BASIC tape anymore. Good night... Friday evening: use the word processor/printer a bit to run of a couple of pages of mailing list. No problems. BASIC will also boot, with lots of retries. Try out the "Buck Rogers" cassette game -- witness lots of error retries. Saturday afternoon: get BASIC up, with difficulty. play for an hour or so. Saturday evening: can't reboot BASIC. At all. Sunday: OK, so the magtape has problems, I can still use it as a fancy electric typewriter, right? I type in a 4 page memo, load some fanfold paper, and go out for breakfast (noisy and slow, but who cares). 1/4 of the way down the fourth page the printer starts printing garbage. Shut it off for a few hours. Sunday evening: BASIC still won't boot. The printer now starts printing garbage within ONE LINE. I take it down and carefully put this pile of garbage back into its original packing material... SUMMARY: within less than 20 hours of use, and less than 10 output pages, the magtape and printer are clearly shot. The processor occasionally seems to lose its mind, which wouldn't be too bad if you didn't have to pray that your tape would survive one more spin. Too bad...It would have been nice to get so much for so little. =Ned=
strom%brl-bmd@sri-unix.UUCP (11/11/83)
From: Charlie Strom (NYU) <strom@brl-bmd> Ned, my experiences with the Adam thus far are quite different than yours, though that may be because I have a different orientation. I purchased this machine specifically to get a cheap CP/M machine running (and hopefully to make a few dollars selling some software) and of course must cool my heels until I can get that capability. I also need a second telecommunications machine so my wife can play around on Compuserve while I do the more "important(?)" stuff. My machine has performed flawlessly, though I must say I have not left it running more than about two hours at a time in the week I've had it. I have fiddled with the word processor but have not yet typed any real documents on it; I have several pages to do this weekend though. As for BASIC, I have negligible interest in it. It does boot up, but I have no plans to do much with it. I am sorry that you are having troules and hope that it is a fluke. That makes a even tie of one thumbs up and one thumbs down (the apparent total population of Adams on the net at this time.)