The answer is the Adam computer by Coleco. What motivated this post was coming across a tangle of old cable and computer paraphernalia while cleaning up the basement. The original price for this computer was $1,000 which was pretty cheap considering Apple II systems were going for around $3,000. It also included a daisy wheel printer so you had good quality print rather than what those awful first dot matrix printers produced. You hooked it up to an old TV for a monitor and the data was stored on cassette tapes.
We got it new for $300 at Canadian Tire when it was discontinued. I sent my husband out to get an electronic typewriter and he came back with this because it was $100 less. I avoided it for a while because it seemed rather complicated just to do some typing but then I learned computers could talk to each other. So, with a 300 baud modem I became connected to the world. A very different online world than today's high speed, graphic laden, easy web browser environment. Then, it was all text, unfriendly, command driven, slow....but tremendously exciting all the same!
