As I started to write this, I was thinking about my first “real” computer – a Macintosh IIci. My grandmother sprung for the whole setup, and it ran us about $3,000. It was beautiful – an 80 MB hard drive and 5 MBs of RAM. The guy who sold it to me said it was, “All the computer you’ll ever need.” Within a couple of months, Apple had released the first PowerMac computers, and my IIci was instantly obsolete. The only thing it was good for at that point was hitting the guy who sold it to me with it.
But as I thought about that dinosaur, I realized it really wasn’t my first computer. No, that was a Coleco Adam. You read that right – Coleco, the same company that brought us the hard plastic-faced Cabbage Patch Kids. It had a whopping 64 KB of RAM and as for storage, that was handled by an ever-so-special tape drive. And as for video, well, that was provided by the owner of the computer – me. I had to hook it to my TV set.
Now, when it came to performance, it was just as good as it sounds. That thing would have made a better boat anchor than a computer. I never really got the tape drive to work, so it was close to impossible to accomplish any tasks with it. I think I got it from a toy store for about $100, and it wasn’t even worth that much. However, I do wish I still had it because it’s now worth about double for what I paid for it on eBay.
