Re: Ancient wares and present values

["Paul Grammens" <grammens@svn.net>]

Roy and/or Janet Miller <millers@inetnebr.com>
>
> My first computer was a Coleco ADAM.

Same here-

I still love the machine. What killed it
> was 1) Abandonment by it's creator (like Apple with the ][), and 2)
Piracy.
> After the ADAM was abandoned there was a increase in users, and lots of
reduced
> price Coleco software, but if you wanted to get new software you had to
buy it,
> and you had to buy it at prices that made it worth the while of the
artists.

Not in my reality. In my reality, there was no software available other than
what I got with the machine.

> ADAM users didn't want to do that, so piracy was rampant, and the
developers
> slowly, one by one, closed up shop, or moved to platforms where what they
sold
> wasn't ripped off (at least not as much.)
>

That was pre-internet, are you saying there were BBS's pirating the tapes or
what? I find that rather dubious. You're the only other person I know of
who used the Adam.
I moved to the IBM, where piracy is as routine as driving over the speed
limit. Oh, yeah, it happens to be the most successful platform, too, and the
one where developers make the big bucks. Apparently, it's better to have a
smaller slice of an enormously larger pie.  I've run into some pretty
ingenious copy protection schemes used on business software, yet Microsoft
doesn't use them to protect it's top sellers. I suspect they've learned that
pirates buy upgrades. Whatever. The proof of a pudding is in the eating, and
there is no question that the IBM way was more successful than the Apple
way.
-Paul