Entertainment Computer System

The Entertainment Computer System was an add-on peripheral for the Intellivision. It was Mattel Electronics' second attempt at creating a peripheral to upgrade the Intellivision into a home computer, rushed into production to appease the Federal Trade Commission after they began fining Mattel for false advertising following consumer complaints about the repeated delays in releasing the originally planned Intellivision Keyboard Component add-on. The Entertainment Computer System or ECS includes the Computer Module, Music Synthesizer, and additional hand controllers; each sold separately. Any Intellivision Master Component is compatible and a requirement to use the system.

When Mattel Electronics originally released the Intellivision in late 1979, they advertised that the Intellivision — unlike its primary rival, the Atari 2600 (then known as the Atari VCS) — would be upgradeable to a fully functional home computer via a hardware add-on accessory called the Keyboard Component. Many potential buyers were excited by the notion (especially parents, who liked the idea of a machine that could be turned into an educational tool, or at least something more useful and practical than just a game-playing system), and many bought Intellivisions on that basis alone.

The planned Keyboard Component would have offered a 16kB of RAM (expandable to an unprecedented 8 megabytes), built-in cassette storage for programs and data (plus a simultaneous audio track that could be played under computer control), an optional 40-column thermal printer, and a secondary CPU to run all of these expanded features independently of the Intellivision's CP1610 processor. Unfortunately, while the planned Keyboard Component was an ambitious design, it had some reliability problems that proved difficult to overcome, and it was far too expensive to manufacture and sell. The Keyboard Component — originally planned for a 1981 release — was continually delayed and pushed back as Mattel's engineering group, headed by David "Papa Intellivision" Chandler, kept going back to the drawing board trying to find ways to overcome these problems.

Eventually, complaints from Intellivision owners who had chosen to buy the Intellivision specifically on the promise of a "Coming Soon!" personal-computer upgrade caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which launched an investigation of Mattel Electronics for fraud and false advertising. Mattel tried to claim that the Keyboard Component was a real product that was still being test-marketed, and even released a small number of Keyboard Components and a handful of software titles to a few select retail stores (as well as offering them via mail-order to any customers who complained loudly enough) in order to support this claim. The FTC was not impressed and finally, in mid-1982, they imposed a fine of $10,000 per day until the promised computer upgrade was in full retail distribution.

...
Wikipedia