-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
In article <280620030317197960%macsvolume@yahoo.com>,
Max Volume <macsvolume@yahoo.com> wrote:
In article <gcGdnTcGZLDio2CjXTWJhQ@comcast.com>, Bill Garber
<willy46pa@comcast.net> wrote:
The C-64 couldn't touch the Coleco, because at the price they had only a
VERY poor DMP, and their infamous tape system.
DMP, I believe, is Dot Matrix Printer. ;-)
Right, and the "poor DMP and infamous tape system" sounds like a knock
on Coleco, not Commodore, except that the ADAM printer was a daisywheel
or other form of impact printer, not a dot-matrix. So how exactly do
those two undesirable features mean the C-64 "couldn't touch" the ADAM?
Yes, the Adam used a daisy-wheel printer. For cranking out documents in the
era before laser and inkjet printers (afforable ones, anyway), a daisy-wheel
printer would've delivered far superior print quality. (Not everybody
wasted time with games and demos...some of us did real work with our
computers.) Dot-matrix printers generally did only a usable job with text,
but had the advantage of being able to do graphics as well as text.
BTW, dot-matrix printers are also impact printers. (If you want to be
pedantic, laser and inkket printers use smaller dots in a matrix to form
images and text, but "dot-matrix printer" typically refers to a heavy, noisy
beast that uses 9 or 24 small pins poking at a ribbon to put ink on paper.)
IIRC, the Adam also had some sort of high-speed tape drive, not merely a
cassette recorder with nonstandard connectors (what Commodore did to lock
you into paying extra for theirs). A disk drive would've been better, but
it may have been a bit much to expect one in a computer system that cost
less than $1000. That's one reason why Apple II and IBM PC systems often
started well over $1000 (over $2000 wasn't uncommon, and that's what you
continued to pay for a decent computer system through the mid-to-late-'90s).
They were proof that you get what you pay for.