1983: Mattel Electronics Intellivision Computer Module Part 1

Mattel Electronics Television Computer Module

Picture yourself in 1980, when you just bought an Intellivision game console for your child (or yourself), picking it over the Atari 2600. It's likely your decision was influenced by the advertising on the Intellivision box that you would be able to upgrade your Intellivision with a keyboard and make it your own home personal computer. Wow...imagine being able to program in BASIC...whatever that was...and type on your television screen...and buy an extra printer if you wanted to print it out....and....well that's about all you could do with home computers of the time. No internet, no sophisticated word processing software, no business software...much like what tablets were when they first came out, they were really just expensive toys that played games and let enthusiasts tinker. How could you justify spending hundreds, even thousands, of dollars on a complete computer, printer and tape drive, when you could do your typing on an inexpensive typewriter?? Not until the early 90s did home computers become powerful enough to be real working tools that truly made things easier. But you wanted to be cutting edge, you wanted to show off how you could type a paper and edit it and save it on an audio tape to come back to later, print revised copies effortlessly, and play some cool games, all made possible with the Keyboard Component promised within the year by Mattel Electronics!

Except it didn't quite play out like that.

By the promised 1981 release, the original Keyboard Component, which was far more advanced than any other computer system of the time, was experiencing some serious problems with reliability and it was prohibitively expensive to actually produce and sell. While Mattel Electronics tried to overcome the problems, fed up Intellivision owners who had bought the system expecting a Keyboard Component started complaining, and the Federal Trade Commission started investigating Mattel Electronics for fraud and false advertising. While the keyboard component was released in limited quantities, in 1982 the FTC fined Mattel Electronics $10,000 per day that the promised computer add-on was not released. To stop the fines, Mattel Electronics killed the original keyboard component and finally rushed out a project they had originally intended to be a an inexpensive educational device to teach kids how to program, and in January 1983, the Entertainment Computer Module, or ECS, was released.

What the hell is this thing called?

So, if you look at the pictures, you can see the box says Computer Module, the actual device says Computer Adapter, and the official name in the manual is the Entertainment Computer System. Most just call it the ECS...but talk about confusing branding...

Was this ECS everything Mattel Electronics promised? Not really. By the end of 1983, Mattel Electronics had fired almost everyone in the hardware department and shifted their focus toward software. Only a dozen ECS titiles were ever released, which were actually pretty good, but by this time, newer and better computers were released, among them the Coleco Adam, Timex Sinclair 1500, the Apple III Plus, and even the Apple Lisa were far more advanced and capable for the price. Mattel even released a standalone comptuer, the Mattel Aquarius, in the same year, but it was ridiculed as "The system for the 70's", and was killed only a few months after it was released.

What a mess of cables and boxes...

As you can see from the picture, the ECS just plugs into the side of the Intellivision through the game cartridge port. In order to use the ECS, you had to plug in an Intellivision game cartridge (or ECS cartridge) or else it wouldn't work. The ECS was actually designed to save data to an ordinary audio cassette recorder, but you had to buy 3 specific cables and your recorder had to have the proper plugs.

Aux was for a printer, also using a standard 3.5mm audio cable. Remote went to the tape player for a total of 3 wires for the tape player drive.

I happen to have an Aquarius computer tape drive, that I will cover in a later post, that worked with the ECS, and the cables are just 2 3.5mm audio jacks and one mini 2.5mm audio jack. Imagine having to plug a flash drive into 3 places with special cables...

Why two Siamese twin plugs for the keyboard...

A little door pops up to show the two input plugs and an audio balancing knob. They came out with games for the ECS that could use up to 4 players, the Intellivision's original 2 controllers plus 2 extra controllers that you could buy to plug into the ECS. In fact, unlike my Intellivision system, the Intellivision II (just a smaller, white version of my Intellivision) had removable controllers...you could actually plug in an Atari joystick or Sega Genesis controller into your controller to replace the odd disc-phone controllers of the Intellivision. I wonder if I could plug an Atari controller into the ECS and use it instead of my hard-wired Intellivision phone controllers...

If you wanted to use the included keyboard, it takes up both ports....it's the strangest thing, a Siamese twin plug. Plus there is the audio balancing knob...you see the ECS has it's own sound chip separate from the Intellivision...actually the first thing the ECS manual says to do is to type 10 lines of BASIC to match the volume of the Intellivision sound chip to the ECS sound chip....very bizarre. Though the Intellivoice module has a similar separate volume control for voices.

They also released a music keyboard for the ECS that you could use to play music in the built in synthesizer...that's right...no built-in tape drive, no built-in menus or options or controls, but by golly there is a music synthesizer! More about that and BASIC in Part 2...

A bit different from modern keyboards.

The keyboard has the basic QWERTY layout of modern computer keyboards, but you can see the shift keys, the control key, arrows, and return key are in completely different spots. Plus the alternate characters are all different, you can see there is no exclamation point or @ or & symbol among other oddities...but overall it's actually not that bad. It's kind of small, like an iPad keyboard size, but I can type normally on it. Besides, the ECS has no lowercase letters so the shift keys being in the wrong place don't throw me off too bad. What really gets me is there being no backspace, you have to use the arrow to move around and manually fix your error.

Advertising on the back of the ECS box.

It's a shame that at this point in history Mattel Electronics was hemorrhaging money and the top brass was trying to move away from hardware. The ECS, as flawed as it was, had the potential to have really good games and do more than what it was originally intended for. With our cell phones, tablets, laptops, and constant interaction with computers every day, it's hard to imagine a time when having a simple, primitive home computer made you cutting edge and really ahead of your time.

Or people just laughed at you for wasting money on a typewriter that couldn't type papers that you had to plug into your television...

Next, part 2 where I will make some videos and show some of the software capabilities of the ECS!