website/content/museum/coleco-telstar.md

title, categories, origins, years, cpus, params

title	categories	origins	years	cpus	params
Coleco Telstar	Pongs	U.S.A.	1976	GI AY-3-8500	name image company company_name specs tabs forum_thread photos links videos related oc_id source Telstar /media/museum/photos/coleco_telstar_2s.jpg /companies/coleco Coleco label value NAME Telstar label value MANUFACTURER Coleco label value ORIGIN U.S.A. label value YEAR 1976 label value BUILT IN LANGUAGE 1 - Tennis\ 2 - Hockey\ 3 - Handball label value KEYBOARD 2 knobs built-in the console label value CPU GI AY-3-8500 label value SPEED Reset label value CO-PROCESSOR ON/OFF, Difficulty Beginner/Intermediate/Pro label value RAM On screen label value COLORS Black and white label value SOUND Built-in beeper label value I/O PORTS TV RF video output label value OS Yes label value POWER SUPPLY 9v DC label value PERIPHERALS No label value PRICE $50 (USA, 1976) photos links videos 649 title subtitle text image COLECO TELSTAR /media/museum/photos/coleco_telstar_2.jpg title subtitle text image BOX /media/museum/photos/coleco_telstar_box_2.jpg title subtitle text image VIDEO WORLD OF SPORTS This model produced by Montgomery-Ward is identical to the Coleco Telstar. /media/museum/photos/montgomery-ward_video-world-of-sports_s.jpg title url text The story of the Telstar systems http://www.pong-story.com/coleco.htm PONG STORY.COM has nice pages dedicated to the Telstar systems title url text Coleco Telstar TV advert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdjE4Yywmpc Length: 29 s /museum/coleco-telstar-classic-model-6045 /museum/coleco-telstar-colormatic-model-6130 /museum/coleco-telstar-colortron /museum/coleco-telstar-ranger 665 url date https://web.archive.org/web/20230614011025/http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=665 2023-06-14

The Telstar was the first "pong-in-a-chip" system. Here is what says Leonard Herman abouth the Telstar in its excellent book "Phoenix, the fall and rise of videogames":

"Coleco released Telstar in 1976. Like Pong, Telstar could only play video tennis but it retailed at an inexpensive $50 that made it attractive to most families that were on a budget. Coleco managed to sell over a million units that year. Ironically, one reason for the super sales can be traced to a severe chip shortage. Because of the onslaught of manufacturers who wanted to produce videogames, General Instruments under estimated the number of chips that they needed to fulfill the demand by sixty percent. Coleco didn't suffer at all from the shortage. Because they had been the first company to place an order with General Instruments, Coleco received a full supply of chips just in time for Father's Day 1976. No other company received an entire shipment of chips and many received only twenty percent of what they ordered ! With numbers like this it isn't hard to imagine how Coleco took the lead in the home videogame race."

The system in itself is quite simple and offers only 3 games. The paddles are built-in the system, a common fact on the first pong systems. There's a 3 positions switch that controls difficulty (beginner : slow ball, big paddles / advanced : fast ball, big paddles / expert : fast ball, small paddles). If this is common to the first Telstars, this is quite different from most of the other pong systems which offer individual settings.

All these features are quite weird when you know that AY-3-8500 chipset offers 6 different games and more setting options... But here lies the "marketing genius" of Coleco. The Telstar was only the low range model of a whole forth-coming product line with enhanced features. Thus the first Telstar was intentionaly limited!

The "World of Video Sports" system seems to be a variant of the Telstar, but not different in any way...apart from the plastic overlay of course...