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In the episode Lisa Gets an "A" of The Simpsons, there is a fictional computer called Coleco:

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Is that computer based on a real one or are there any records of computers resembling that?

hippietrail
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guest
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4 Answers4

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Is that computer based on a real one or are there any records of computers resembling that?

Yes and no.

There is no computer exactly like the one shown, but Coleco was a successful video game company, rivaling Atari with their ColecoVision system. It may have been the best system available in 1982, selling half a million units between August and Christmas.

In Summer 1983 they presented the Coleco Adam computer as well as the Expansion Module #3, which would turn the ColecoVision into a computer system compatible with the Adam. Generally a great idea (*1), if it wasn't for two issues: for one, it was just before the video game crash of 1984, and the Adam was quite bug ridden - or at least, that was the impression customers got from media reports about the system.

So while the device shown in this Simpsons episode is rather generic (apart from the sticker/logo) and has no resemblance to either Coleco system, the story shown clearly references to the perceived bad quality as well as the non existent sales.

*1 - In fact, the Adam had quite competitive specs for the time. While CPU, Sound and graphics hardware is comparable to later MSX systems it also featured two fast, built-in cassette drives, 80 KiB of RAM, a network interface, a printer included and quite a lot of software - including the ability to run all ColecoVision games. Everyone seeing the system in 1983 was easily convinced that it would be a huge success.

Toby Speight
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Raffzahn
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    I had a Coleco Adam, I did not notice many bugs with the development system and environment (and I am and was a professional programmer). However, using cassette tapes for data storage/retrieval is another story, they are inherently unreliable and IIRC, the Adam used longer (rather than shorter) tapes which are even worse. – RBarryYoung Aug 08 '20 at 17:08
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    Thank you. Could you consider adding that that bears a resemblance to the Commodore PET, as pointed out by @Dranon? I've seen some pictures and they are indeed similar. – guest Aug 08 '20 at 23:35
  • @guest Not really. I do not belive that it's intended to cite the PET. It's meant as a generic blocky case. In fact, there are many others that are more close than a PET, from Hazeltine Terminals to Sharp's MZ-80 series. – Raffzahn Aug 08 '20 at 23:40
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    Maybe you could cite all these as examples of "generic blocky cases"? I ask because, although they may be obvious examples for people in this community, they aren't for me. This is the very reason I made this question in the first place: the computer in the show looks old school, but I couldn't find examples like the ones you just cited searching on the internet. – guest Aug 09 '20 at 00:03
  • I don't think you can make much of a case for colecovision being the best console of the time. If you wanted to play Donkey Kong, maybe. But I found the 5200 to be better. Going to be an opinion thing. – Almo Aug 09 '20 at 00:51
  • @guest there are literally dozens. Mentioning them would not make any sense, as the drawing is clearly not referencing any particular. It's like asking i a box with wheels reassemble any real car. Thus adding examples will not add insight but be quite missleading.. – Raffzahn Aug 09 '20 at 00:51
  • @Almo They are quite similar in graphics and sound, so I guess it's up to taste. Technically the 5200 was for sure able to do a good Donkey Kong - but Atari didn't really offer any great game - Breakout as start title was a joke. The 5200 suffered from several home made problems. For example 2600 compatibility was only added short before it got scrapped, while Coleco had it from the start. Similar the 5200 was as well incompatible with the 400/800 despite using the same chipset. Last but not least, the test of time: >2m Coleco vs <1m 5200 sold in their two years of existence. – Raffzahn Aug 09 '20 at 01:04
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    Atari did offer some great games. Defender, Berzerk, Missile Command are just three examples. Number sold doesn't mean a lot either; NES way outsold the 7800 despite the 7800 having far suprerior hardware. 64 hardware sprites vs 8. – Almo Aug 09 '20 at 02:52
  • @Almo If the number of sprites tells, than the Coleco was superior to the 5200 with 32 vs. , right? There is no sense in comparing random facts out of context. People bought the Coleco, not the 5200. Also, isn't selling at the core of success for a console? – Raffzahn Aug 09 '20 at 06:57
  • The video system of the 5200 was a lot more flexible than the Coleco one. Yes, the coleco had more sprites, but its video hardware was very rigid. Some of the 5200 cartridges were ported to the 800 since the main difference was the hardware addressing. I remember seing a bunch of these conversion signed 'Glenn the 5200 man' and I just googled him and he was interviewed: https://computingpioneers.com/index.php/Glenn_The_5200_Man – Thomas Aug 09 '20 at 21:00
  • @Thomas I'm pretty aware about the 5200 capabilities - and I do consider the Atari design as one of the best, if not the best of all 8bit systems. Still, the 5200 simply failed. Being the best console does take more than good hardware - especially considering that most games do only need rather basic capabilities. – Raffzahn Aug 09 '20 at 21:13
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    @Raffzahn, I have to agree with that. Coleco came up with a strong catalog very early on. As a kid I had a 2600 and I remember seeing the Coleco at the shop with dk, dk jr and zaxxon and I thought it was amazing. – Thomas Aug 09 '20 at 21:16
  • Absolutely ridiculous you're starting a console war about 30-year old consoles.I only commented that it's not obvious that one was the best. Then I said what my opinion was, not that it was a fact. That rendition of DK did not impress me at the time. But I never really liked DK that much anyway. So whatever. – Almo Aug 10 '20 at 00:20
  • @RBarryYoung: I wonder if the prototype tape drives used in system development behaved better than specified, causing the people designing the electronics and software to be tolerant of wow/flutter levels present in those units, while production units were designed to be as cheap as possible while meeting spec? Interestingly, when Steve Wozniak was developing the Disk Controller II, one of the drive mechanisms he'd special-ordered from Shugart was an out-of-spec reject, which meant his first controller design didn't work, but he was able to fix it, thus ensuring... – supercat Aug 10 '20 at 15:19
  • ...that it would work with any drive that was anywhere close to being in spec. If nobody involved with Coleco engineering had done anything similar, it's easy to imagine how one could end up with a system whose software would work well with some higher-quality drives, and whose production drive mechanisms would work reliably if data were written more slowly, but whose production drive mechanisms couldn't work with production software. – supercat Aug 10 '20 at 15:22
  • @supercat Given that the tape drives would erase part of the tape if it was in the drive when turned on , I think that they just didn't do very extensive testing. If they never tested enough to realize what power-up did to the tape, I doubt that they ever got to subtleties like what repeated FF and Rewind might do to it. (They did add a warning about the erasure problem, but that was later, after many customer complaints). – RBarryYoung Aug 10 '20 at 15:31
  • @RBarryYoung: Things like that could be bad initial design, or they could be a result of changes between engineering and production. I can easily imagine, for example, that initial units might have prevented accidental erasure both through power supply sequencing and through an extra layer of control circuitry on the tape-write circuitry, either of which would have been sufficient on its own to prevent the problem, and neither of which would have been necessary to prevent the problem were the other retained. Remove them both, however ... oops. – supercat Aug 10 '20 at 15:43
  • @supercat Oh, definitely bad design, but that's the kind of thing that good testing is supposed to detect. And this does have the air of some ill-advised cost-cutting move somewhere in the process, possibly by production, but again, initial units off a new production line are supposed to be tested before full production and release. – RBarryYoung Aug 10 '20 at 15:47
  • @RBarryYoung: A big part of the cost of QC and QA is not testing, but having a means of fixing problems found thereby. If one holds off on large-scale production until one has had a chance to test out the final design iteration, great, but if shipping schedules won't accommodate such delays, one may be pushed into a choice between "guarantee we miss Christmas", or "ship and hope for the best". – supercat Aug 10 '20 at 16:12
  • I had a quick look and the first MSX-spec machine and the Adam were released essentially simultaneously, both in October 1983. As usual, I think I’ve contributed nothing. – Tommy Jun 29 '23 at 22:13
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The only Coleco computer I know of is the Coleco Adam, but it did not look like the computer in the Simpsons. The Coleco logo is very similar to their actual logo though.

Of course Coleco is most known for their home video game system the ColecoVision.

Glen Yates
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The script is clearly a reference to the Coleco Adam, but the computer design doesn't resemble the machine. Most likely the animation department had no idea what such a machine would actually look like. While it probably wouldn't have been hard to find reference material for the artists, having an arbitrarily-chosen case design that would have been considered out of date even when the Adam was new probably makes the show even funnier than it would have been with a historically accurate picture. Perhaps poor Gil wasn't actually hawking real Coleco Adams, but instead got snookered in the 1980s into buying some fake Coleco Adams he's been trying to offload ever since.

supercat
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  • Who is Poor Gil? – Omar and Lorraine Aug 10 '20 at 19:49
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    @OmarL: Gil Gunderson https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Gil_Gunderson is the character who was trying to foist the computers onto the school. I'm not sure why nobody seems to like my observation that there's no need to have the artists drawn anything that actually resembles a Coleco Adam, since using a historically-accurate likeness of the Adam wouldn't have made the scene any funnier. – supercat Aug 10 '20 at 20:46
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Yeah, looks nothing like an Adam, but Coleco did make a computer called the Adam. Honestly, as somebody above mentioned, it looks closer to a Commodore PET. But it also looks very similar to the TRS-80 Model 3 and Model 4. So it's probably just intended to represent a cheap, out-of-date computer.

Greg
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