ADAM Printer

The ADAM's daisy wheel printer, and the most consequential single part of the machine: it contains the power supply for the entire system. Nothing runs without it connected, so a failed printer is a failed computer - a design decision that did the ADAM's reputation lasting damage.

What it does well

• Letter-quality output. A daisy wheel strikes a fully formed character against a ribbon, so the page is typewriter work rather than dot matrix work.
• The machine starts in typewriter mode, passing keystrokes straight through to the printer, so it is useful before any program is loaded.

What went wrong

• Printers failed often enough from launch to become one of the two faults the ADAM is remembered for, the data pack drives being the other.
• It is slow and loud beside the dot matrix printers of the same years, which is the trade every daisy wheel makes.