Mattel Aquarius

~ the last words ~

Mattel Electronics announced the Aquarius in 1982 and got it into American shops in june 1983 at $160. It had a Z80 at 3.5 MHz behind four kilobytes of RAM, and a 48-key rubber chiclet keyboard of the sort that teaches a child to hate typing. Video came out of a TEA1002 encoder giving 80 by 72 semigraphics in sixteen colors, which is not a resolution so much as a set of blocks. Programs loaded from cassette or plugged in as cartridges.

Four kilobytes was the number that decided everything. The Commodore 64 had sixteen times the memory and was in a price war that took it under two hundred dollars that same summer. Mattel was asking a hundred and sixty for a machine that could not hold a serious program, at the exact moment Commodore was burning the price floor to ash and taking Texas Instruments down with it.

It was withdrawn in october 1983, four months after going on sale. Mattel then paid Radofin, which had designed and built the thing, to take the marketing rights off its hands. Mattel Electronics itself did not last much longer as a going concern; the whole consumer electronics adventure was closed down and sold off, and the Aquarius was one of the smaller items on that list.

I was a baby in Turkey when all of this happened, so there is no memory here to offer, but the mechanism is one I can read straight off the object. This was not a Mattel computer. It was a Hong Kong contract manufacturer's design with a toy company's name printed on it, and it failed in a way that had nothing to do with anyone at Mattel making a bad engineering call, because nobody at Mattel made an engineering call at all.

~ the record ~

~ whose computer it actually was ~

Radofin was already building Intellivision consoles for Mattel, so when Mattel decided it needed a home computer to sit under the Intellivision, the obvious move was to ask the people who were already on the production line. Radofin had two designs in hand, known internally as Checkers and Chess. Mattel took Checkers and called it the Aquarius. Chess became the Aquarius II.

Anyone who has shipped consumer hardware in the last fifteen years will recognize this instantly, because it is now the default rather than the exception. You find a reference design and you negotiate the badge, and the specification you end up selling was fixed by somebody else in another country before you were in the conversation. What the Aquarius demonstrates is the failure mode: when the design is not yours, you cannot fix it when the market moves, you can only stop selling it. Mattel stopped selling it.

~ the funny part ~

Mattel's own programmers, the people who were supposed to write software for it, took to calling it a system for the seventies. The line is credited to Bob Del Principe. It is a good joke because it is precise: the machine was not merely weak for 1983, it was built to a set of assumptions about what a home computer needed that had expired before the tooling was finished.

Of the thirty-two titles Mattel announced for the Aquarius, twenty-one ever came out. That is a fairly exact measure of how quickly the internal enthusiasm ran out, since the ones that were cancelled were cancelled by people who could see the sales figures.

~ the long tail ~

Radofin took the rights back and kept the machine alive for roughly another two years, selling it under other names into whichever markets would have it, including as the Kronos Europea. Four other companies ended up marketing the unit at various points. The Aquarius II shipped with sixteen kilobytes and a real mechanical keyboard, which is what the first one should have been, and almost nobody bought it.

There is a small and genuinely fond scene around the Aquarius now, which is what tends to happen to strange cheap hardware that vanished before it could disappoint anyone for very long. People still write new games for it. The machine got a longer life from hobbyists than it ever got from the company whose name is on the case, which is a reasonable outcome for something that was never really that company's computer to begin with.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »