Another addition to the menagerie
A couple of days ago another parcel arrived at ‘Chez arb’, this time containing some Mattel goodies - An Intellivision Intellivoice module plus games and a Mattel Aquarius computer! This was the first Aquarius I have seen on eBay Australia and I managed to win the auction at a very reasonable price for such a rare machine.
Interestingly, the Aquarius was actually designed and built by Radofin, a name which I am familiar with duue to my obsession with the 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System. (The 1292 was an early cartridge-based game console which was manufactured by a number of companies, including Hanimex, Acetronic, Prinztronic, Fountain and Radofin - one day I will get around to writing an article or two about this great system.)
From the information available on the net, only around 20,000 Aquariuses were ever made, with a production run lasting from June 1983 to October 1983 - five months! It seems the Aquarius was underpowered and overpriced and died a quick death.
I’ve only hooked it up to the TV once for a quick looksee, so I really don’t have much to say about it yet. The keyboard is a chicklet-style keyboard, with an overlay containing BASIC keywords over some of the keys. In a fashion similar to Sinclair compters, you can use shortcuts to enter most BASIC keywords, which with a chickllet keyboard is a welcome addition - these things are not made for touch typists! The memory is a whopping 4 kilobytes and the inbuilt BASIC is (naturally) a Microsoft variant. The seller had a single game cartridge for the Aquarius which is a port of an Intellivision game called AstroSmash. The graphics are very primitive, especially compared to the Intellivision which was already a well established system by the time the Aquarius came out. I am sure the poor graphics contributed to the system’s early demise.
Overall the Mattel Aquarius is a nice looking, if severely underpowered computer. I’ll now start to hunt for information on the web and hopefully get a bit of time to play with this interesting piece of computer history…