The name of the
peripheral connecting
bus on the
Coleco ADAM computer. Controlled by a 6801
microcontroller, it connected the
keyboard,
printer,
CPU and digital
tape drives.
In concept, it is very similar to Apple Macintosh Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) in concept, except nothing else was available to add to it. The ADB, on the other hand, supported numerous devices.
Basically AdamNET was a serial network for peripheral devices. The devices could include disk drives, tape drives, keyboards, and other components. For each device, it implemented a 6801 microcontroller (though a 6805 was used for disk drives) to handle the messages. In the Adam's main computing unit, a master 6801 was used to manage the common serial line, and it communicated directly with the Adam's Z80 CPU.
For each device, it's 6801/6805 operated as its own "node" on the network. These nodes would listen to the messages that came over the serial line, and determine if the message in question was for the listening device. If so, it would take the message, process it, and respond to it. If the message was not intended for that node or device, it would go to sleep and ignore all network traffic until the serial line was idle again. Once the serial line was idle, the node would then start listening for messages again.
While there was never much available for this "network", beyond the Adam's standard devices, there was apparently a serial/parallel device in development at Coleco which was to operate on AdamNET. It was never released.