We all make stupid purchases.
Some of them involve cars. Some involve clothes. And some of us—those of us who came of age alongside rapidly evolving technology—made very expensive bets on machines that aged about as well as milk.
When I first started thinking about my “first real computer,” my mind went straight to the Macintosh IIci. My grandmother, God bless her, went all in. Monitor. Keyboard. Mouse. The whole beige-and-gray altar of Apple worship. The grand total came in somewhere around $3,000, which in today’s money is roughly the cost of a small used car or one semester of college textbooks.
It was gorgeous.
An 80 MB hard drive.
5 MB of RAM.
And the salesman—may his socks forever slide down into his shoes—looked me dead in the eye and said, “This is all the computer you’ll ever need.”
Within a couple of months, Apple released the first PowerMacs, and my IIci went from “cutting edge” to “museum exhibit” almost overnight. The only practical use it had at that point was as a blunt-force object with which to locate the salesman and have a discussion about truth in advertising.
But as I was laughing about that dinosaur, I realized something.
That wasn’t my first computer.
No, that honor belongs to the Coleco Adam.
Yes. That Coleco. The same company that gave the world hard plastic-faced Cabbage Patch Kids that stared into your soul and never blinked.
The Adam boasted a jaw-dropping 64 KB of RAM. Not megabytes. Kilobytes. Storage was handled by a cassette tape drive, which was exactly as reliable as it sounds. And for a monitor? Oh no. That luxury was on you. You hooked the thing up to your television and hoped no one in the house wanted to watch anything while you were pretending to compute.
Performance-wise, the Adam was… ambitious. I never really did get the tape drive to work consistently, which meant actually doing anything with it was nearly impossible. It spent most of its life warming up, making alarming noises, or reminding me that the future was still very much under construction.
I think I bought it from a toy store for about $100, which somehow still feels like a bad deal. In hindsight, it would have served society better as a boat anchor. Or a doorstop. Or a warning.
That said, I do wish I still had it—because, in a delightful twist of irony, it now sells on eBay for about twice what I paid for it at the toy store. Apparently, time has been far kinder to the Coleco Adam than it ever was to me.
Which just proves two things:
- Technology ages poorly.
- Nostalgia appreciates beautifully.
And somewhere out there, a salesman is still telling someone, “This is all the computer you’ll ever need.”
Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
