FROM THE ARCHIVES Before the ADAM had a name — before it had a shipping date — the video game press was already trying to guess what it would be.
Found this two-page spread in Video Games magazine, June 1983, written by Mark Brownstein. It's pre-launch coverage of what would become the Coleco ADAM Family Computer System and the ill-fated Expansion Module #3 (SuperGame Module) — written before Coleco formally announced either product at Summer CES.
Reading it now, forty-three years later, some of the guesses are impressively accurate. Others didn't age as well.
What they got RIGHT:
✓ Attaches via the expansion port
✓ BASIC programming language
✓ Built-in printer
✓ Built-in record/playback storage
✓ 40 characters per line, 24 lines, two-color display
✓ Uses the ColecoVision's Z-80A CPU
✓ Priced around $175-200 for the keyboard unit
✓ "Boxy appearance" — they nailed that one
✓ Third-party developer support incoming
What they got WRONG:
✗ "You won't need to purchase other equipment." (Marketing overreach Coleco itself would repeat.)
✗ Expansion Module #3 as described here — a game-first "SuperGame Module" with microwafer storage — never shipped in this form. It effectively morphed into the standalone ADAM Family Computer System.
The real story here — the microdrive:
The second article is entirely about the Entrepo microdrive — the "stringy floppy" endless-loop tape technology Coleco licensed for what would become the ADAM's Digital Data Pack (DDP) drive.
Some tidbits that jumped out:
Microwafers measured 1.6" × 2.7" × 0.2" — smaller than a business card Compared in the article to "a midget 8-track cartridge" — tape only moves one direction, beginning and end spliced together 20 times faster than audio cassette storage 128K of storage per microwafer (about 100 game screens) Manufacturer Exatron had just changed its name to Entrepo ("a storage place") in February 1983 Production target: 250,000 microdrives and 2.5 million microwafers per month, moving manufacturing to the Far East Texas Instruments also licensed the technology for their $139.95 wafertape driveBy the time ADAM shipped in late 1983, the microwafer had become the DDP. The rest is history — a very complicated history for Coleco, as we know now.
I love these old magazine articles because they capture the exact moment when the industry was still guessing what a product would be. No hindsight, no post-mortem — just informed speculation about the future.
Do you remember reading previews like this back in 1983? Or is this the first time you're seeing it? Drop a comment — I want to know how many of us were kids reading Video Games magazine cover-to-cover.
Every article and artifact I catalog like this gets preserved on
colecovisionadam.com