Re: Ancient wares and present values

[Roy and/or Janet Miller <millers@inetnebr.com>]

Paul Grammens wrote:

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

> 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.

"My reality" was Jackson, Mississippi starting Christmas 1985. Some retail
stores still had Coleco stuff, and Coleco had adds in Family Computing selling
their stuff at fire sale prices. That's how I got ADAMLogo, ADAMCalc,
SmartFiler, SmartTyping, CP/M 2.2 and dozens of Coleco games. I also bought
stuff from third party people, like Hacker's Guide to the ADAM, through the mail
and I was able to see their ads in Family Computing mostly, sometimes in
Compute! I was in grad school at the time, and wealthier students bought IBM
PCjrs, but 5-10 of us bought ADAMs. One neat thing is the PCjr people had a
really nasty thermal dot matrix printer, and one prof refused to accept papers
that were printed out with it, while the Diablo print of the ADAM was
acceptable. I only knew one student who had an Apple, it was a //e with the
Apple color monitor and Duo disk, I would guess that he had an Imagewriter I,
but I really don't remember.

>
>
> > 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.

That's exactly what I'm telling you. For instance, I was given what we called a
bootleg copy of Wordstar for the ADAM. It was interesting to play with, but not
really usable without an 80 column card and two disk drives, and I didn't have
any of that equipment, but the two digital data drives, which were helpful when
it came time to make new digital data packs yourself, or to save your cartridge
games to tape. And that's the rub. I knew of people who backed up games from
cartridge to tape and traded tapes. I know that I received one like that, I may
have done the same myself - I really don't remember. Yes, I received pirated
software, though at the time I had never heard of "piracy" and really never even
thought about the ethical implications of my actions or those of my friends.

>
> I moved to the IBM,

As did I, in the spring of 1987.

> 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.

The Wordstar people used to say that there were three pirated copies for every
legal one, but they had the idea that it was something like shareware, if
someone wanted to upgrade or get a manual, they had to pay for it.

> 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.

M$ has no sense of humor at all about piracy. Don't even think of calling in for
help unless you can prove that you are the original buyer of software. They will
seek you out. Of course, with rivals all but out of the scene you now have to
pay to call for help.

> 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

That's another sad story.

Roy