The Coleco Adam arrived in October 1983, but its entire existence was a disaster. From delays in its official launch to the huge list of defects reported by users, the Adam became one of the worst computers in history. However, the keyboard was one of its most positive features, and enthusiast Nick Bild decided to create a Teensy 4.1-based adapter to convert it to USB.
Coleco's commercial adventure in the home computer market was perfectly summarized in a famous episode of The Simpsons, Lisa Gets an "A". That episode aired in November 1998, and it debuted on television ten years after Coleco declared bankruptcy. A combination of bad decisions led the company to that situation, but if we have to talk about a trigger… many arrows point to the Coleco Adam.
The idea of offering a computer and a printer in the same package went over well in June 1983, when it first showed the Adam at that year's CES. However, Coleco delayed the launch date four times, the number of computers distributed never crossed the 100,000-unit mark before the end of the year, and the return rate associated with factory defects exceeded 80 percent. The only highlight defended by the press at the time was its keyboard, and that is what brings us together today.
The keyboard of a Coleco Adam, on a modern PC
The demo doesn't exceed 40 seconds, but it's more than enough to verify that the adapter created by Nick Bild works perfectly. The Coleco Adam keyboard suffered no modification: all the heavy lifting is handled by a Teensy 4.1, connected to the output port through specific pins, with the help of an RJ-12 header.
The code is nothing more than an Arduino-compatible sketch, which suggests it could be modified to use other alternatives to the Teensy (the original costs 30 dollars, while a clone of the Pro Micro doesn't exceed 10 euros). Nick warns that we must change the serial mode of the Arduino IDE to Keyboard, and that some keys (Store/Get, Wildcard, and the six function keys) need to be mapped.
Official site: Click here. Source: Hackaday.
