Sometime before the failed Aquarius home computer scheme was hatched by Mattel, the Intellivision team had attempted to expand Intellivision into the growing home computer market by turning it into a full fledged computer dubbed as the "Intellivision Keyboard Component", much in the same way Coleco was soon to do with their Adam computer.
The unit featured a built-in cassette tape drive for loading and saving data. The Keyboard Component would plug into the cartridge slot on the Intellivision, and had an additional cartridge slot of its own to allow regular Intellivision game cartridges to be played in the usual way.
It used the famous 6502 microprocessor as its base. This device was a promise made by Mattel way back in 1979 when they claimed the Intellivision could be upgraded to become a 64K computer.
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@Christian - I remember this being advertised before then C64 existed so I would say no... :)
Thursday 16th September 2021
Zaius
From the photo, it literally looks like a Commodore 64. Wonder if that was what they were aiming for?
Tuesday 22nd September 2020
Christian Benvenuto (United States)
NAME
Keyboard Component
MANUFACTURER
Mattel Electronics
TYPE
Home Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
September 1981
END OF PRODUCTION
august 1982
KEYBOARD
Mechanical keyboard 59 keys (TAB, ESC, LOCK, CTRL, CLEAR SCREEN, SHIFT x 2, RETURN, DEL, REPEAT)
CPU
8-bit 6502 processor
CO-PROCESSOR
TMS9927 videochip, GI CP1610 from the Intellivision console
RAM
16K 10-bit shared RAM
TEXT MODES
40x24 monochrome text display could overlay regular Intellivision graphics
I/O PORTS
input for a microphone and two additional expansion ports for peripherals and RAM expansion
BUILT IN MEDIA
Tape drive. The cassettes have two tracks of digital data and two tracks of analog audio completely controlled by the computer
PERIPHERALS
Expanded memory cartridges, 40-column thermal printer was available a telephone modem was planned along with voice synthesis and voice recognition
