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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!floyd!whuxle!pyuxll!ech
From: ech@pyuxll.UUCP (Ned Horvath)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: ADAM considered harmful
Message-ID: <424@pyuxll.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 7-Nov-83 15:16:04 EST
Article-I.D.: pyuxll.424
Posted: Mon Nov  7 15:16:04 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 8-Nov-83 14:53:38 EST
Organization: American Bell, South Plainfield NJ
Lines: 59

The following is a log of my experiences with an ADAM.  The short review is:
If this package at this price sounds too good to be true, your intuition is
right on the mark: 'taint true.  Perhaps I got a lemon, but if I did it was
a thorough-going lemon.

Details:
afternoon, Thursday 11/3: picked up the machine at a Consumer's Distributing.
evening: read all the documentation cover to cover.  The BASIC manual is
very poorly written and pretty sketchy, so have a Microsoft/Apple BASIC manual
near to hand to interpolate with.

Midnight: I can either go to bed or hook it up.  Obvious choice, I can sleep
anytime.  The setup is straightforward and simple, I turn it on, and play
with the "electric typewriter" mode a bit (this is the boot state), kick in
the "word processor" mode (this is in ROM and comes up very fast).  This
gets boring (and VERY noisy!) very fast, so...

1am: load up the BASIC "datapack" (no, BASIC is NOT in ROM and, despite what
you might assume from the glossies, there is only ONE drive, the other is
simply an empty window).  The datapacks are so-called stringy-floppies,
aka carefully engineered high-speed cassettes.  I play with a few
simple programs, store them on tape, try reboots + reload + run...not bad!

3am: by this time it is becoming apparent that the whole system has some
heat dissipation problems.  The printer box (which is what plugs into the
wall and has the main power supply) is getting very warm indeed.  The
Cassettes are also warm to the touch when removed, especially near the head:
this may be frictional heating.

4am: Experiencing a lot of difficulties with the tape: obviously there is
a lot of error-retry going on.

5am: Can't even boot the BASIC tape anymore.  Good night...

Friday evening: use the word processor/printer a bit to run of a couple of
pages of mailing list.  No problems.  BASIC will also boot, with lots
of retries.  Try out the "Buck Rogers" cassette game -- witness lots of 
error retries.

Saturday afternoon: get BASIC up, with difficulty.  play for an hour or so.
Saturday evening: can't reboot BASIC.  At all.  

Sunday: OK, so the magtape has problems, I can still use it as a fancy
electric typewriter, right?  I type in a 4 page memo, load some fanfold paper,
and go out for breakfast (noisy and slow, but who cares). 1/4 of the way
down the fourth page the printer starts printing garbage.  Shut it off
for a few hours.

Sunday evening: BASIC still won't boot.  The printer now starts printing
garbage within ONE LINE.  I take it down and carefully put this pile of
garbage back into its original packing material...

SUMMARY: within less than 20 hours of use, and less than 10 output pages,
the magtape and printer are clearly shot.  The processor occasionally seems
to lose its mind, which wouldn't be too bad if you didn't have to pray that
your tape would survive one more spin.  Too bad...It would have been nice
to get so much for so little.

=Ned=