Over the last few decades, we have seen the growing evolution of printers from largely static peripherals that focused on printing high-quality documents to standalone pieces of office equipment that can be used not only for printing but also for scanning and photocopying.
Advancements in their design have also made them considerably more reliable, particularly if regularly inspected and repaired before more substantial issues start to develop.
What has inadvertently helped in this case is learning what can go wrong from the less reliable units of the past, and there has perhaps never been a more unreliable printer than the infamous Coleco Adam combined unit.
Intended to be a home office designed with teenagers and students in mind, the Adam managed to make every design mistake a printer could possibly make.
Was The Coleco Adam A Computer With A Printer Or A Computerised Printer?
Initially announced to great fanfare in 1983, the Coleco Adam was extremely integrated in its design. It was originally developed out of the ColecoVision games console, a highly expandable unit that could be turned into a home computer through the use of an extensive module.
The Adam had perhaps one of the most unique designs of any computer, in that it was entirely reliant on the printer in order to run.
Unlike any other computer on the market, the Coleco Adam received power through its connection to the printer, which was itself connected to the mains power supply. It even booted into a typewriter mode by default, known as SmartWriter.
Who Was The Coleco Adam For?
During a time when home computers were a gigantic and fairly novel market, the Coleco Adam was aggressively marketed as the cheapest “complete” system on the market, designed to be great for work, homework and having fun afterwards.
Whilst competitors such as the Commodore 64 were extremely cheap by themselves, they required a floppy disk drive and a printer to be used effectively as a home office, which could often treble or even quadruple the price.
The Adam was sold for $600, cheaper than its competitors once the printer was taken into account, and was cheaper than many letter-quality printers available on the market at the time.
It used daisy wheel printing, which was cheap and produced relatively high-quality text at the expense of being limited to only producing the characters on the wheel, being extremely loud and being very slow.
However, as a complete system, it was a tantalising prospect, especially in a United States market that saw home computers as the future of electronics and a device that every home and small business would need.
What Went Wrong With The Coleco Adam?
Coleco bet everything on the Adam, aggressively gambling that its printer, faster tape drive and compatibility with ColecoVision games would make it impossible for customers to ignore.
Unfortunately, its biggest selling point was ultimately what sealed its fate.
Following months of costly delays, the Adam was released with a particularly unreliable printer that became notorious for breaking down.
Part of the reason it was so slow, it turned out, was that if it ran any faster it would shake itself to pieces.
Consumer Reports, a long-running magazine that focused on quality assurance, refused to review the Adam because all four of its preview machines broke down. Several major retailers also dropped their orders for similar reasons.
Even when it worked, it had an astonishing flaw where turning the system on generated a magnetic field that destroyed the data of nearby tape storage.
The printer’s use of daisy wheel technology, whilst excellent for letters, meant that it could not be used to print images, cards or any other desktop publishing applications, unlike the lower quality but more versatile dot matrix printer available at the time.
What helped even less was that the delays meant that Commodore had time to fix its supply issues and get much cheaper. By the end of 1983, a Commodore 64, disk drive and printer cost around the same, but with a much larger install base and far more options for printers.
Finally, the home computer market as a whole started to struggle, as the promises of a computerised future turned out to be further away than people expected. It would take another decade, Windows 95 and more sophisticated inkjet computers for this to change.
Coleco badly lost that bet, ultimately discontinuing the Adam after just 24 months and never truly recovering. They withdrew from the electronics market in 1985 and declared bankruptcy in 1988 once the Cabbage Patch Dolls craze began to wane.
What Did The Printing World Learn From The Coleco Adam?
Ultimately, whilst there were a lot of lessons the computing world more broadly learned, there were some lessons that printers and printing businesses would realise as well:
- Affordability matters. The Coleco Adam was only as successful as it was because it met the needs of very small businesses and the printing requirements of families at the time at the lowest possible cost.
- Integration of hardware is an excellent idea as proven with multifunction devices,
- The reliability of an entire printer or photocopier should not be dependent on its most unreliable elements. In this case, the entire computer and thus its ability to print was reliant on a printer that could frequently shake itself apart.
- Any piece of business equipment will only be used if it can be trusted to work almost the entirety of the time. Unreliability creates reluctance and the development of alternative, less optimal approaches.
All of these elements are central to the choices of equipment we offer, and the various hiring, leasing and services we provide.