APF Imagination Machine

Last Updated on April 9, 2024 by Dave Farquhar

The APF Imagination Machine was a hybrid game console/home computer from 1979 that sought to exploit a gap in the market. Although it was not a commercial success, it is a historically interesting machine and they were not the last console to attempt that approach.

Computer sold separately

The Imagination Machine was available two ways. You could buy a game console called the MP1000 for $130 and add an optional expansion peripheral to turn it into a home computer. Or you could buy it all together as a full-fledged home computer for $600. Some of the early reviews suggested buying the game console for $130 and deciding later if you wanted to upgrade.

For a machine that is largely forgotten today, it received a fair bit of coverage when it was new. It wasn’t just computer magazines either. Magazines like Popular Science and Popular Electronics also covered it, frequently side by side with the Atari 800 and the Texas Instruments TI-99/4, all of which came out in the fall of 1979.

The reviews liked Atari better, but they noted the Imagination Machine was the least expensive computer of the group.

The brainchild of Ed Smith

The Imagination Machine’s designer’s name was Ed Smith. Smith was an African American electrical engineer who grew up in public housing in Brooklyn. He taught himself to repair TVs and radios for neighbors who couldn’t afford to take them to the shop using schematics he found at the library, and saw that as the way out of the ghetto and the Up South cycle. He studied electronics at George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School, then went to night school to study computer science and marketing. APF tasked Smith with reverse-engineering the Atari 2600, the TRS-80 Model 1, Commodore PET 2001, and Apple II and designing a competitive system from off-the-shelf chips that could sell for about half the price of the Apple.

Smith ended up designing a system featuring a Motorola 6800 CPU, a Motorola 6847 graphics chip, and a single sound channel with a range of 5 octaves. You can look at the Imagination Machine as the predecessor to the TRS-80 Color Computer or Dragon 32. It has the same graphics chip, but a slightly less advanced processor. The 6800 was no slouch, but saw more use in early kit computers than it did in prebuilt home computers from later in the decade.

The 6800 was an unconventional choice. It was too expensive for Atari to use in 1977, but by 1979, Motorola had cut the price. There were cheaper options available, but the 6800 provided a good balance of power and price. The 6800 had more grunt than the 6502 series of CPUs Atari and Apple used, and since there was room in the budget for it, using it made sense. In retrospect, using a 6502 so they could have more flexibility on the system’s price might have been helpful.

APF’s plan

APF expected Atari and Mattel to release expansion modules for their game consoles to turn them into a computer. Their goal was to beat them to market with something better. What they came up with had a much more powerful CPU and a much more conventional graphics subsystem than Atari had, but it only had 8 colors and it didn’t have hardware sprites.

The Imagination Machine beat the Atari expansion to market. Indeed, Atari never released a product to turn the 2600 into a full-fledged computer, although some third parties eventually did. The problem for the Imagination Machine was what Atari did release in November 1979, the same month as the Imagination Machine.

Entering a crowded market

The Atari 400 was a full-blown home computer with 8K of RAM, a 6502 processor, and advanced graphics and sound, priced at $550. The only knock on the Atari 400 was its membrane keyboard. If you wanted more RAM and a serious keyboard, you could step up to the Atari 800, which had 16k of RAM and a full travel keyboard for $1,000. Both machines entered the market in November 1979, the same month as the Imagination Machine.

Ed Smith points to the release of the first floppy disk drives for the Apple II in 1979 as another problem for the Imagination Machine. And that’s a fair statement. But I think the even bigger problem was that APF tried to build something between the Atari 2600 and Apple II in price, and they overestimated how long they would have that market to themselves. Too many others were thinking the same thing. So the Imagination Machine, TI-99/4, and Atari 400/800 all hit the market within a few weeks of each other in the fall of 1979.

And things only got worse as time wore on. In 1981, Commodore released its inexpensive VIC-20 home computer. It only cost $299, so for the price of an Imagination Machine, you could get a VIC-20 and outfit it with some nice peripherals and interesting software.

The home computer market quickly became engulfed in a price war.

Integration

Ed Smith recounted in a 2020 interview that the engineers at APF wanted a modular design, but the company was consumer-focused and wanted an integrated unit with everything you needed built in. The built-in tape drive arguably made sense in 1978 when they were designing it, but aged poorly once inexpensive floppy drives were widely available.

When they were designing the Imagination Machine, one of the machines they were competing against, the Commodore PET 2001, had a built in tape drive. But by 1979, the tape drive was a separate-sale item on all the other computers the Imagination Machine was competing with. If you went with Atari, TI, Commodore, or Apple, and you didn’t want the tape drive and wanted to get a disk drive instead, the tape drive wasn’t forced on you. You could get a floppy drive for the Imagination Machine too, but it wasn’t a matter of either/or. It was both.

Differing design philosophies

APF spent an outsized part of its budget on the CPU, where TI and Atari spent more of their budget on graphics and sound. The APF’s graphics and sound looked fine compared to the Apple II, but weren’t as good as Atari or TI. The Imagination Machine’s premise was that it was a game console that could be expanded into a home computer, giving the productivity of a computer and the fun of video games. TI and Atari, who both had the means to design their own chips, delivered on that promise of the productivity of a computer and the fun of video games better than APF could.

The Imagination Machine wasn’t a bad idea overall, and Coleco copied the idea just 3 years later with its Coleco Vision console and its Adam expansion module to turn it into a full computer. With a few tweaks here and there, the Imagination Machine probably could have been more successful than it was. And there was someone who did have a pretty good run selling the Imagination Machine quickly. It just wasn’t APF.

The Imagination Machine and Protecto

When you find mention of the Imagination Machine, a fair number of people who remember having them say they bought it after seeing an ad in a magazine from a Chicago area dealer called Protecto Enterprizes. Or a hobbyist who gets one with all the paperwork will notice an old invoice from Protecto included with it.

Protecto sold the Imagination Machine during the 1981-82 time frame, after a successful run liquidating the Interact home computer. They also ran a club for the machine, offering members-only discounts on software, providing technical support, and mailing out a monthly newsletter.

Protecto sold the computer alone for $239, a deep discount over the $599 retail price. They also sold it in a bundle with extra documentation, a programming tutorial package, and APF’s Space Destroyers game on cassette for $289. The three items sold for $65 when purchased separately, and Protecto claimed they were a $100 value.

The Protecto-APF arrangement

Many of the details of the arrangement APF made with Protecto are lost to history. But there were some clues in the February 1982 newsletter. In that issue, Protecto apologized for delays in shipping the computers and peripherals. They said the first floor of the warehouse where their inventory was stored experienced a burst water main pipe that flooded the first floor and destroyed the inventory. Protecto said they were able to acquire replacement inventory, but it caused delays in shipping. They also said inventory they expected to last 6 months sold out in a single month.

That’s easy to dismiss as hyperbole, but in a January 1984 interview, a Protecto employee said they went looking for another computer supplier when it was clear that APF wanted out of the computer market. And I did find one account of someone who tried to buy an Imagination Machine in 1981, and Protecto told them it was sold out, and offered them a Commodore VIC-20 instead.

Interestingly, in that 1984 interview, which was published in a Commodore magazine, the employee went out of his way to say the Imagination Machine was actually a good computer.

When inventory ran short, Protecto needed another product to sell, which led to them becoming a Commodore dealer and later branching out even further to sell the Laser 128 Apple clone.

Protecto seemed to have no trouble selling the Imagination Machine at a price of $239. The trouble for APF was hitting a price point that would work while turning enough profit to keep the company going.

What happened to APF, the makers of the Imagination Machine

I think it was a misstatement that APF wanted out of the computer business. They were working on new standalone version of the Imagination Machine when the New York banks pulled their funding in 1981. They wanted APF to concentrate on calculators rather than video games and computers. The company management handed the company over to the banks in 1981 and left. It took about two years for the banks to wind down the company operations.

This could explain the disparity in the accounts from Protecto and from former APF staff. It’s possible, even likely, that Protecto came into the picture after the key players from APF had left the company, and it was the management the banks put in place who wanted out of the computer business.

This would also explain how Protecto ended up running a computer club for the Imagination Machine and providing support. If APF could no longer do those things themselves and Protecto could find a way, it stood to benefit both of them.

Back to Ed Smith

Ed Smith never forgot where he came from. He accumulated surplus game consoles APF was going to scrap and took them back to his old neighborhood, where he gave them to families who could never afford a game console at the time. He bristled at the racism he experienced, recounting that when he saw an MP1000 at Sears and told the salesperson he helped design it, the salesperson dismissed him.

After APF effectively ceased operations, Smith continued his journey selling computers rather than designing them. When Black Enterprise magazine interviewed him for the December 1982 issue, he was working at Castle Computers in Latham, New York. Apple hired him not long after that, and then he jumped to Novell, who was then the market leader in computer networking. Late in his career he worked at Infosys, the India-based outsourcing firm.

And in the mid 1980s, he returned to Brooklyn to move his mother out of the apartment he’d grown up in. He bought her a condo in the New Jersey suburbs.

Smith arguably hasn’t achieved the fame of Jerry Lawson, another African American video game pioneer who worked on the Fairchild Channel F, including inventing the entire concept of the video game cartridge. That could be because he left the video game industry in 1981 and his brainchild was confined to being sold out of the back pages of magazines at fire sale prices. But he achieved the American Dream, pulling himself out of the ghetto and coming back and taking his mother with him. Today, he works as a consultant, telling people how he did it and helping them to better themselves as well. Ed Smith’s blog post Coding is the New Rap is a must-read.