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| Mattel home informatic system |
Since the very beginning, Mattel did try to look different from the rival Atari VCS 2600, presenting Intellivision as the core of a much more professional system than just a videogame console.
In 1980 Mattel announced to be ready to deliver the next Year a new hardware expansion providing keyboard and cassette player.
The new product would be launch in 1982 in just 4000 units for the US market only by mail postage.
What the Keyboard Component added to the Master System was an additional 8 bits 6502 microchip, 16K of RAM expandible to 8 MBs (huge for the time), a keyboard, a cassette player to read data or audio, an expansion slot and the printer port.
The package was impressive, but from a commercial point of view it was impossible to market properly, due to expensive development costs.
In fact, the only reason why the Blue Whale project (also known as Intelliputer) become real, is that the responsable of the development was the father of Intellivision Dave Chandler.
The few units of the Keyboard Component were sold and tested in some areas of US, but the high price faced the reluctance of customers. |
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