Commander X16

To keep the retro computing theme going, what was the oddest or non-mainstream computer you ever owned? Perhaps something that was a commercial flop, rare, or just weird.

Mine has to be the Coleco Adam. I got one in late 86 i think it was, second-hand from a local shop. It didn't work but I thought I knew the issue, and I was right, the PSU had stopped working. After replacing a blown capacitor, it was up and running.

 



I also had another one given to me many years later (late 2000's). I tore through my photos but can't find any of my Adam, sadly, I got rid of it a few years ago. Taking up way too much space and kept having to me maintained. They were VERY prone to failure. ?

I had the dual cassette version with no expansions and never owned the disk drive, but I did have a large games library since I had so many Colecovision games at the time. I also managed to snag some of the "Super" versions of the games, basically enhanced versions of games that came on cassette with "better/more" graphics, sounds, and sometimes more content than their cartridge counterparts. I had Super Buck Rogers, Super Donkey Kong, and DK Junior.

I only had the "Smart Filer" (organizer software) and "Smart Basic" programs for it, and I managed to kill the Smart Basic cassette becasue I was unaware of a huge issue the system had back then.

Overall, it was a neat system with far too many flaws, many I could not just look past. Especially compared to other systems.

 

> It  could release an electrical pulse that damaged cassettes or disks that happen to be close to the system when powering it on. Yeah, it had a friggin' EMP. lol

> It booted to it's built in word processor software. It wasn't bad, but I much preferred loading  into BASIC. The WP software was also glitchy and required a hard power reset to get out of.

> You want BASIC, you have to load it from cassette.

> The cassettes were proprietary, as were the drives, to maximize space and speed. They were not compatible with off-the-shelf cassettes. The loading of software was also done automatically, no load commands.

> The PSU was located IN the printer. NOT the computer itself. So there was no option back then to use the Adam without the printer. It was also prone to failure.

 

Here is a very good video I found that sums up the Adam quite well.

 

I did  have fun messing with it, but compared to Commodore or Apple, it just didn't stand a chance. Maybe that's one reason it was a huge flop.

Either way, what's your story? ?

 

3 hours ago, Strider said:

 

I had a keyboard from one of those. It was a Radio Shack surplus item. It probably wound up getting tossed in the bin.

(Radio Shack also at various points also sold Commodore Vic-20/64/16 and TI-99/4A keyboards as surplus items as well.)

And speaking of Radio Shack, the worst computer I've ever owned is one I got for free, and fairly recently — a TRS-80 MC-10. I still have it. It's completely stock, which means that it has 4K of RAM. There's no monitor output, so you have to hook it up to a TV with an NTSC tuner. It has the cassette port and printer-serial port from a Color Computer, but no slot for Program Paks. It does have a connector for attaching a 16K RAM expansion. And since that connector's pinout is basically the entire CPU bus, it could have been a way to attach more sophisticated peripherals like a disk controller, but Radio Shack never built anything like that. And that CPU is a 6803, not a 6809, so it isn't capable of handling OS9. Worst of all, it has a hard plastic tiny chiclet keyboard.

To its credit, it will run most Color BASIC programs, as long as they aren't too large or depend on features specific to the CoCo. And it has similar graphics capabilities, though limited by available RAM (with the 16K RAM expander, it'll handle 256×192 in 1-bit color), as well as similar, i.e., extremely limited, sound capabilities, too.

The 6803 has an onboard UART, but since the system was clocked at 3.58 MHz for the sake of NTSC video, the UART doesn't sync to normal baud rates, so the serial port has to be bit-bashed.

I already posted in another thread that I had a two floppy monochrome supertwist LCD "luggable" PC compatible from Amstrad, the PPC640.

7 hours ago, kelli217 said:

And speaking of Radio Shack, the worst computer I've ever owned is one I got for free, and fairly recently — a TRS-80 MC-10.

I actually can't recall if our Radio Shack sold surplus or not, I don't think they did, but I could be wrong. I would have found that cool. :)

I never owned the MC-10, in fact, back then I really didn't care for the TRS-80 line of computers. I was talking about that in another thread, while many people called the TRS-80 Color Computers "Coco", we called them "Trash-80's". It wasn't until many years later, after they were long obsolete, that I grew to appreciate them. I really never got into the small form factor computers of the era, with the only exception being the ZX Spectrum. Or any of the pocket computers, I just didn't see the point of them at the time.

56 minutes ago, BruceMcF said:

I already posted in another thread that I had a two floppy monochrome supertwist LCD "luggable" PC compatible from Amstrad, the PPC640.

I have never seen one of those before, looks neat actually. I also never had any luggables, I didn't get my  first "laptop" until sometime in the mid 90's I think it was. Pretty much for the same reason I didn't care for other portables or small form computers, they could not do what I wanted and were so expensive for what little they could do. That's how younger me looked at it anyway. haha

2 hours ago, Strider said:

I have never seen one of those before, looks neat actually. I also never had any luggables, I didn't get my  first "laptop" until sometime in the mid 90's I think it was. Pretty much for the same reason I didn't care for other portables or small form computers, they could not do what I wanted and were so expensive for what little they could do. That's how younger me looked at it anyway. haha

Yeah, I got that one basically BECAUSE it wasn't a big hit in the market, being less portable than a laptop and less powerful than a desktop with a hard drive: I bought it from an electronics discounter who seems to have got stock being liquidated. For me, it was a cheap PC cheaper than a desktop + monitor would have been. The ability to be car-mobile with a cigarette lighter plug was a pure bonus.

8 hours ago, BruceMcF said:

Yeah, I got that one basically BECAUSE it wasn't a big hit in the market, being less portable than a laptop and less powerful than a desktop with a hard drive: I bought it from an electronics discounter who seems to have got stock being liquidated. For me, it was a cheap PC cheaper than a desktop + monitor would have been. The ability to be car-mobile with a cigarette lighter plug was a pure bonus.

The cigarette lighter power option would have been awesome!

About 20 minutes from where I lived was a huge computer/hardware reseller. Basically, they would go in and buy up all the "old" hardware from large compaines after they do upgrades, repair and sell hardware, and buy from other liquidators to sell on their floor. They literally had pallets of computers and racks upon racks of hardware for sale. No idea if they are still there, I moved away in the early 2000's, but I would go in a buy up barebone systems, get them up and running, and sell them in my small hometown. A nice little side-business at the time. Profits I sunk into my own computers and hardware. That's also where I got my first laptop.

Looking back, I really wish I had given the luggable portable computers more of a chance, there are a few I would love to have today. Hindsight is 20-20, live and learn, and all that jazz. ?

 

Edit: Wow, that place I would go to buy all my used hardware from is still around, and it looks like they have expanded a lot in the past 15+ years since I moved away. Now I want to to go back and see what they have. haha

https://www.epcusa.com/about-us/

11 hours ago, BruceMcF said:

I already posted in another thread that I had a two floppy monochrome supertwist LCD "luggable" PC compatible from Amstrad, the PPC640.

I had one of those. I worked on it for a while. Was working for this company in NL and they'd given me the original IBM PC to work on (the 4.77Mhz 8086 one), using interpreted BASIC. It was so slow .... it could keep up with the typing, let alone run anything.

This is a UK machine I had the Memotech MTX.  I had some disk drives for it as well. It's all solid metal case, so it weighed a ton.

In many ways it was a MSX type machine - Z80 + RAM + TMS9918, though it wasn't actually MSX compatible, and most of the games were ports from similar machines. It had plenty of RAM though, mine had 64k, and banked ROM, which included a sort of Hypercard type program, a fairly advanced machine code monitor, and oddest of all, a BASIC which took inline assembler, but it didn't work like the BBC ones, it was more like an editor built into the BASIC itself. I also remember it had a cartridge that was supposed to run Spectrum programs ..... that never worked. I can't quite see how it would work.

 

25 minutes ago, paulscottrobson said:

This is a UK machine I had the Memotech MTX.  I had some disk drives for it as well. It's all solid metal case, so it weighed a ton.



In many ways it was a MSX type machine - Z80 + RAM + TMS9918, though it wasn't actually MSX compatible, and most of the games were ports from similar machines. It had plenty of RAM though, mine had 64k, and banked ROM, which included a sort of Hypercard type program, a fairly advanced machine code monitor, and oddest of all, a BASIC which took inline assembler, but it didn't work like the BBC ones, it was more like an editor built into the BASIC itself. I also remember it had a cartridge that was supposed to run Spectrum programs ..... that never worked. I can't quite see how it would work.

It's got a very clean look to it, never seen one of those before either, very cool! I had issues getting programs to work on the Adam as well, I remember some carts not wanting to load, but they worked in my Colecovision. Never did figure out why.

The "heavy" construction from the 70's and 80's is something I actually miss at times. My first computer was a TI-99/4A, and I had a Peripheral Expansion Box with it. That thing was heavy! Almost all metal, housed it's PSU, disk drive, and expansion cards (many of them were in metal enclosures themselves). That thing weighed a ton, and oddly enough, I loved it.



 

To this day, my modern system sits in an almost all steel case (HAF 932). I dislike plastic and thin sheet-metal cases. I think it's more due to quality and robustness than anything. I do a lot of work inside these machines, so I want them to hold up. ?

8 hours ago, paulscottrobson said:

I had one of those. I worked on it for a while. Was working for this company in NL and they'd given me the original IBM PC to work on (the 4.77Mhz 8086 one), using interpreted BASIC. It was so slow .... it could keep up with the typing, let alone run anything.

Yes, it had a NEC V30, which was an 8MHz 8086 chip, so roughly equivalent to an XT, but slightly faster due to some instructions running in fewer clock cycles. For running WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS to write my dissertation, it was quite smooth, as well as running AWK scripts in a DOS port of an open source Linux AWK. For running my maximum entropy estimator, written in C, it was SLOW, and glacially slow when running in debug mode, but if it hadn't been for the PowerC with integrated debugger, I doubt I would have ever finished that program.

Really, the only part of it I am nostalgic for as I type on my hand me down and now "old" SONY Viao laptop is the keyboard. It wasn't a sweet Cherry mechanical switch keyboard, but it was full size, full travel, with all of the keys in the right places.

So the primary reason I wish I still had it (it died in a flooding of my US storage unit during my decade in Australia) is that the V30 also has a direct 8080 opcode emulation mode, so it can run CP/M directly at 8Mhz, which is otherwise quite a trick for an IBM-XT class system.