The Commodore Amiga is what did it for me – what really solidified my interest in computers.  It was amazing at the time – great graphics, fantastic sound, and it could multitask – all things that people take for granted today, but many people shunned at the time.

Why do you need color graphics on a computer?  Why do you need sound?  Why would someone want to run more than one program at the same time?  All features that typical PC clones lacked, and questions that PC users asked.  The Amiga was really ground breaking and forward thinking.

I saw my first Amiga at a computer store called Microlimits in Greenville, RI.  I remember taking a long (couple hours?) bicycle ride with a friend after school one day just to check the Amiga out for 20 minutes – I couldn’t stay longer because I needed to be back home to run my paper route.  I remember the short clips of digitized music that played from the computer speakers that seemed so amazing at the time – something  so taken for granted today.

I went on to own 3 different Amigas – the 1000, the 3000 and the 4000 before finally giving in and switching to PC clones because Commodore failed to stay ahead of the competition.  It was a sad day because I loved my Amiga computers – they were different, they had personality.

A few people I knew had Commodore 64s and I remember envying the software they had – mostly a cousin who lived out of state and we visited once per year.  He had TONS of software - what seemed like an amazing amount to me back then.

I saved up and purchased another Commodore 64.  I had some money left, enough for either a 1541 disk drive or a bunch of floppy disks – but not both.  The yearly trip  to visit my cousin was coming up, so I bought disks.  Needless to say I came home with over 100 disks full of software, but no disk drive!  It took a month or two more but I eventually bought a 1541 disk drive and finally got rolling.

I loved my Commodore 64 and used it for years, until….

I must have been 12 or 13 at the time, but even then I noticed the quirks of the Adam.  Booting directly to a word processor seemed odd to me.  The power supply and switch for the whole computer built into the printer??  What if I wanted a new/better printer, or what if my printer died???  Why did my Buck Rogers cassettes keep dying?

But the games were pretty cool.  Buck Rogers was great.  Dragons Lair was amazing even if the gameplay with so simplistic.  Fortune Builder (a ColecoVision cartridge) was an awesome strategy / SimCity type game.

I eventually figured out that my cassettes would die if I inserted them into the drive before powering the computer up.  I remember finding a discrepancy in the documentation – I believe the documentation for my Adam said to insert the cassette then power the computer on.  However, the documentation for at least some of the cassettes said to turn the computer on, THEN insert the cassette, and then hit the reset button on the computer to reboot into the game.

Once I started doing things in the correct order I had no further cassette failures.  My cousin had an Adam as well, and I remember talking to his dad about the problem – but he’s a pretty stubborn guy and if I remember correctly he kept killing his cassettes for some time because he insisted on following the Adam instruction manual.  It was amusing to search the internet recently and discover that this was a common problem with the Adam.

Software for the Adam was hard to find (other than ColecoVision cartridges), and I remember seeing all this cool software for other computers at the time and not much for the Adam.  I remember wondering if I could purchase a game on cassette from my local Radio Shack (for the Tandy I believe) and play it on my Adam – “It’s a cassette, right??  What could be the difference?”.  I must have purchased the Adam right before it was discontinued, which explains why it was on sale for so cheap.

Then I saw the Coleco Adam on sale.  I still remember the commercial I fell in love with – a kid rolling his computer chair along his desk to a different part of the computer and saying “Engage the radar tracking device!”.  It looked awesome on TV, and the whole system including cassette drive and printer was almost the same price as the Commodore 64 I had!  Plus it played all those awesome ColecoVision cartridges.  So, the Commodore 64 went back to the store and I came home with a Coleco Adam.