'38Packard
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RS never reached cult status, like Apple did.
Steve
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Neither did the Texas Instrument TI.
Adam by Coleco was the biggest bomb. One year of massive sales but nothing to run on it.
iirc, the Adam would run Colecovision video games.
RS ran a computer trade-in program one summer, around 85. They ran big magazine ads for the “Clean Up America” program, with the brands of several defunct computers, like the Ti 99/4, Adam, Sinclair, and, unfortunately, Osborne, that RS would give a trade-in allowance on, toward a new RS computer. Osborne sued, insisting they were not out of business (yet) and RS was damaging their reputation.
Steve
back in the Apple][+ days, maybe into the //e times, a WeCo engineer and I adapted an old Northstar Basic genealogy program to run under AppleSoft Basic, took a lot of playing around, many long printouts, and many, many levels of parentheses… But we got it going and I used for a while as it peeked my interest in all these family names I’d heard over the years, but didn’t really understand the linkages… From there, once the mac came along, the LDS Family History program worked flawlessly for years as the old Basic program was left behind… Later via our NCMUG’s Genealogy Group, we all moved to Reunion which we still use today… All very solid, but my interests have waned a bit, but I do have 3,306 names in there… It’s database is stored in Dropbox, unheard of in those early days…
weco
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Yep but it was only a few games and possibly some of them were released after that first and only year of terrific sales. Not great sales by later standards but Adam in what 1981 was the best selling PC. There was no spreadsheet for it or word processor. The games might have been expected to be buggy.
I knew one of the guys who programmed a game on it. Coleco was bankrupt soon after that. Y’all would know Coleco which was a Connecticut toy company by their Cabbage Patch Dolls. Their fortunes rose with that doll. Then they went a little wild on other projects that were not profitable. Adam’s success faked out the management.
I had a girl friend whose mother worked for Coleco. I found the mother in her basement with a ton of epoxy fumes forming a doll’s head one day. She was a doll designer. Coleco was a doll maker before the Cabbage Patch Dolls. I suggested she needed ventilation. She said something to the effect she never had before. She died less than two years later of brain cancer. It was very sad.