The Myth, The Marketing, The Muddle:
The Purcell Pamphlet and Tomy Tutor Demonstration Cartridge

The Purcell Pamphlet

The "Purcell Pamphlet" was the marketing circular that Tomy distributed in America in 1983 featuring their pitchman, er, woman, Sarah Purcell. Ms. Purcell (1948-) is best known as a TV talk show host, particularly for The Better Sex, The Home Show and, during the years of the Tomy Tutor, Real People (read her Wikipedia entry). Since Tomy's shtick was to introduce the Tutor as a unique computer readily useable by good old fashioned normal people and kids, Purcell, the hostess of this highly popular NBC prime-time show (1979-1984, Wednesdays 8pm E/P) about good old fashioned normal people and kids with unique characteristics, was a logical and very well-placed choice. Her fee was not disclosed.

The Pamphlet also introduced Tomy's special trial deal in the United States to try to crack the home computer market that was now rapidly being taken over by Commodore. A full-money back guarantee for up to three days, it's unclear if it made any difference to sales, or how many returns occurred. Given the utter failure that Apple's later and somewhat similar "Test Drive A Macintosh" scheme was, I bet it was a flop.

Finally, the Pamphlet also introduced the entire line of Tomy peripherals, the major members of which (expansion box, disk drive, printer, etc.) turned out to be utter vapourware. In fact, the Pamphlet is the only place where high quality pictures of these particular doomed accessories can be seen, as there appears to be no evidence that they were introduced in Japan for the Pyuuta series.

Everything that is mentioned in the Purcell Pamphlet also has an entry in the Tomy Tutor Catalogue.

Pamphlet Copy

No Parental Guidance Necessary makes it a real computer for people like you.

[Purcell] "Now you can help your kids make their leap into the computer age. And you don't even have to get your feet wet.
    "If you're like me, on one hand you're convinced that computers are here to stay. And that their job is to make life easier. On the other hand, you wish they'd go away and stop complicating things.
    "'Who needs it?' you cry.
    "Your kids do. And it's up to you to give it to them. Even if you don't know the difference between a floppy disk and a slipped disk.
    "Not too many years from now, if they're going to get into college, they'll need to know how to get along with computers. Even today, in elementary school, a lot of kids are already handicapped by not having been introduced to them sooner.
    "Thank goodness for Tomy Tutor, a real computer for people like you. A complete computer that comes with computer ease, instead of computer-ese.
    "The instruction manuals are written so that grade school readers can understand them. And so they can actually be programming in minutes. There's even a Voice Synthesizer available. With it, the Tomy Tutor talks.
    "With the Tomy Tutor, you'll be giving your children every educational advantage. The individual attention they need to learn to spell. The patience it takes to learn multiplication tables.
    "It'll help them in school. Create computer works of art. Program their own computer games.
    "And if you find yourself peering over their shoulders, wondering how your checkbook balance would look in living color, just ask your children to show you how. Tomy Tutor is so simple, any adult can use it."

[Girl] "16K. Wow! What a memory!"

    Tomy Tutor has an inviting, low profile design with raised keys and the same letter spacing as a typewriter. As simple as it is to operate, it has the sophistication of computers costing hundreds of dollars more.
    A 16 bit microprocessor is your computer's brain. It has more than enough capacity to do everything people like you want their computers to do. Make learning more fun. Help around the house. Play games as challenging as in the arcades. And with capacity like this, Tomy Tutor will keep up with the myriad of uses still to come in the future.
    A permanent memory, or ROM, of 32K, to remember all the things the computer thinks are important.
    And a flexible memory, or RAM, of 16K, to remember all the things you think are important. Translated, what all this means is that more pieces of information can be "read" from it and "written" into it than with many other computers of comparable price.
    Not only that. Our 16K memory can be expanded to 64K. So as you grow, it can grow. When we asked our competitors why they stopped where they did, they couldn't remember!
    Clearer, brighter, more vivid color graphics are built-in. 16 colors, so you can "paint" masterpieces. You can even animate them.
    Tomy Tutor "speaks" BASIC, the universal, easy-to-learn language of computers. And because it's built-in, Tomy Tutor is like a child knowing how to talk the day it's born. Smarter, sooner.
    And music. With 8 octaves and numerous tone capabilities Tomy Tutor has outstanding sound capacity and reproduction.

[Boy] "It's teaching me math. That will help me in school."

    Computers are just empty-headed hunks of hardware, just waiting to be fed information called software, or programs.
    Tomy has programs available for every member of the family.
    There is already an exciting library of educational programs -- tutors -- that make learning as easy as playing a game.
    Speaking of games, Tomy Tutor gives you all the excitement and challenge of the arcades -- at home. Even 3-D effects. And if you think computer games are just for fun, try one. The attention and concentration they require ... the reflexes and hand-eye coordination they develop ... your kids are really onto something!
    And in case you ever do want to get your feet wet, there are Tomy programs for Household Management and Personal Finance. Just ask your kids. They'll be happy to show you how to use them!

[Woman] "No, Mom. Peripherals are not a new brand of designer jeans."

    They're pieces of equipment peripheral to your computer, that adds to its usefulness. With peripherals, your Tomy Tutor can grow as your family grows.
    The Voice Synthesizer, for example. You may think that computers are aloof, unfriendly and complicated. Kids find them fun. One reason is that they respond in easy-to-understand words. With the Voice Synthesizer, the Tomy Tutor even talks. Programs come alive as the Tutor gives its instructions and answers out loud. Fun for everyone, the Voice Synthesizer is especially valuable for young children who don't yet read.
    Joy Sticks. For more authentic, arcade-style game playing. So you can dig for gold, catch a shooting star, fight off hungry wolves, or spear an octopus with arcade-like realism. With joy sticks, all those lightning flash reflexes and concentrated attention get translated to the screen. (Your own TV screen will do just fine.) Up. Down. Right. Left. Around. FIRE! They're not called joy sticks for nothing!
    Data Cassette Recorder. Computers are funny. Turn them off and they lose their minds. But with a data cassette recorder and ordinary tape, you can store what you want remembered. Important things like your five-year-old's computer drawing, 'til Daddy comes home; your computer "address book"; your stock portfolio. It also allows you to use a wide variety of pre-written programs.
    Floppy Disk Drive. A wide variety of programs also come in floppy disk form. They look like 45 rpm records and are more efficient than tape. It takes a disk drive to run them through the computer.
    Expansion Box. Takes all the power you already have with your Tomy Tutor and increases it tremendously. As the memory increases from 16K to 64K, nearly 70,000 pieces of information can be stored.
    Printer. A printer means that your children have a way to take their homework to school, without taking the computer with them. Besides, you might want to play with it while they're away.
    Floppy disk drive, expansion box, printer -- available soon.

[Purcell] "It took a company that knows real children and real parents to come up with a real computer like this."

[Purcell] "As the third largest toy company in the world, Tomy has been in the business of making children happy for more than 50 years. Now with Tomy Tutor, they've come up with a way to make parents happy. Tomy Tutor, perfect for the different needs of every member of the family, is the first real computer with no parental guidance necessary. Far from a toy, it's a complete computer sophisticated enough for the most enthusiastic computer buff. Yet simple enough so that even the youngest children can learn how to use it. Without their parents having to show them how."

[Purcell] "And the same kind of company makes you a real offer like this!"

Try it for 5 days -- Free.

The Tomy Tutor Demonstration Cartridge

Main screen and a big-ol' Tomy logo.

A summary of features.

Colour spectrum and basic GRAPHIC usage.

Sprite animation.

Game demonstration, using Traffic Jam (good choice!). The demo includes the music and actually looks exact. The Japanese version uses Night Flight, but that was never sold in the United States, and this is the Tutor's best game in my opinion anyway.

BASIC programming. This is not well carried-off; it doesn't really explain what the code is supposed to do.

You can't actually play this; this is the sample BASIC code above, appearing to play a basic card game.

Entering a GBASIC program ...

... to move a multi-sprite object around and blink the stars.

The complete Tomy Tutor system, including cartridge, joy stick [sic] and joy controllers, and VOICE S. (voice synthesizer), T.RECORDER (Data Recorder), L.PRINTER (line printer) and TI-ADAPTER (!!). More about this in the Commentary.

Commentary

What is noteworthy is that Tomy not only capitalized on this particular fear, but also soothed parents by pointing out that this computer could teach their children how to use it by itself. Although the Demo Cartridge talks about this a little bit, the Purcell Pamphlet unabashedly adopts this tactic throughout just about its entirety. This was important in an age where the parents were equally as inexperienced -- they wouldn't have to worry that the failure would come from their end. A familiar figure like Purcell reminding them of this feature would go great lengths to establish Tomy's credibility. Plus, as many parents were worried that things like the Atari 2600 and Intellivision would rot their children's brains, adding promised educational and home software like the other major home systems (TI 99/4A, Commodore VIC-20 and the new C64) reassured them it wouldn't be merely a boob-tube console.

Many things in the Tutor reality distortion field are quite correct. I observe on the General Information and The Tomy Tutor and I pages that this was an unbelievably easy-to-use computer. I don't consider myself a quick study by any stretch of the imagination, but I was rapidly banging out my own programs with it within a few days: true to its word, I was able to become computer-literate all by myself and quickly. It wasn't hard to manipulate the cassette recorder, programming was straightforward and instant, many of the games were fun and easy to play, and the system was durable and stood up to a seven-year-old's relentless abuse.

Likewise, however, many things never came to pass. The peripheral expansions foundered in Tomy's skunkworks and other than the Data Recorder, joystick and joy controllers the Tutor remained a closed system -- a similar problem for the Pyuuta. Plus, the greatly restricting Tomy OS prevented you from getting into the system to exploit all the power that it supposedly could grant you, something TI learned their lesson with and released Extended BASIC, but Tomy did not (see TI vs. Tomy for more about this). What good is a 16-bit CPU if you can't get to the metal directly?

Ultimately, as is often the case in marketing, Tomy's marketers made many promises that the company never kept. It's for this reason that instead of realizing its promising potential and skyrocketing to superstardom, Tutors turn up today in closets and landfills if they turn up at all.

Now for some specific notes. First, the Pamphlet:

• "ROM of 32K" -- this is false, there's actually more. See the Hardware page.
• "Our 16K memory can be expanded to 64K" -- we'll talk about this when we get to the Expansion System.
• "Tomy Tutor 'speaks' BASIC" -- naturally, it speaks only its odd dialect of BASIC, let alone GBASIC. Tomy made a mistake here by using TI's BASIC, which was not directly compatible with the Microsoft BASIC found on most other home computers. On the other hand, many of the elemental principles were the same, so this can't really be considered a marketing distortion.

Now, the peripherals. Click the thumbnail above for a full view of all the announced devices (96K) as pictured in the Pamphlet (it will open in a new window for reference), and compare it with the screenshot from the Demo Cartridge at right.

• The Voice Synthesizer. TI had their own speech synthesis sidecar module and this probably used the same chip. The dimensions and connector imply that it connected through the I/O port.

• Data Cassette Recorder. The Data Recorder shown in the Pamphlet's photograph is quite different than the one eventually released, with sharper design angles and missing the cheery yellow record button; that's because it's actually the Pyuuta's PR1000 tape recorder (a rebadged National/Panasonic RQ-2739). The Demo Cartridge calls this T.RECORDER (presumably for Tape Recorder). This device also shows up in one of our scans of the Tomy Tutor manual.

• Expansion Box, Floppy Disk Drive and Printer. The expansion box must have also connected through the I/O port too (presumably it has a pass-through for installing the Voice Synthesizer, though see the note below). It is clearly a clone of the Texas Instruments Peripheral Expansion System (see TI vs. Tomy), offering RAM expansion and additional device interfaces, and probably utilizes a similar card-slot setup as well. It is not clear how much RAM is in it, but the TI PEB gives you 32K of expansion, so it is reasonable to assume that the Expansion Box had up to that amount (probably 16K or 32K). This memory was probably in the form of 9995 RAM, not 9918A VDP RAM (see the Hardware section for why this matters). The interfaces for the floppy drive and printer probably were cards intended for the Expansion Box, just like the TI's PEB. For some reason, the Pamphlet's photograph is labeled "Expansion System" but the copy calls it the "Expansion Box."

  The Demo Cartridge also seems to mention the Expansion Box, but gives it a new and very surprising name -- the TI-ADAPTER -- and fails to mention the disk drive at all. This implies that compatibility with TI cards was considered, and the lack of a separate floppy drive almost certainly implies it was incorporated into the "Adaptor" (like virtually every TI PEB I have encountered, including my own). This was probably an early idea, as the Cartridge appears to have existed before the Pamphlet (see below).

  Note that none of these three options were available when the Tutor launched (merely "available soon"), and, eventually, were never available at all. Although you can connect an external printer to a Tutor, Tomy never released that interface in the United States, let alone a printer specifically for it. The printer does bear some passing resemblance to the Oric-1 MCP-40 printer-plotter, however, which Tomy did promise for the Pyuuta.
  

  

  Compare this with the analogous screen from the Pyuuta Demo Cartridge, which again predates the American demo cartridge. In order, the Japanese peripherals on the right from top to bottom are the voice synthesizer and Data Recorder, and, connecting to an orange box labeled "motherboard," are the line printer, floppy disk drive and acoustic coupler. It is interesting that the voice synthesizer is shown having its own independent connection separate from the other interfaces (while the synthesizer mockup above is obviously meant for the I/O port), and unlike the American cartridge, the floppy disk drive is shown as a separate offering. Nevertheless, by the time the Pyuuta was released the voice synthesizer disappeared too and everything was shown connecting directly to the Tutor with discrete interfaces (as depicted in the Pyuuta Manual), including a new "RS232C serial interface" for the coupler. All of them were intended as standalone interfaces; no Expansion Box was offered, not surprising due to Texas Instruments' relative obscurity in Japan, but also meaning that the devices would compete for the single I/O port. This is indeed precisely the case with the BASIC-1 cartridge, which offers the printer interface, and the Game Adaptor (which didn't exist nor was needed at the time), both of which cannot be connected simultaneously. Nothing else, save the joy controllers and the Data Recorder, made it to market in Japan either.

• Several of the Tutor's eventually unreleased cartridges are prominently mentioned in the Pamphlet (while, by contrast, only Traffic Jam appears in the Demo Cartridge). The boy is in front of a mockup for Space Division, and the woman in front of one for Household Management, both of which also appeared on the Tutor box (though only one was referenced directly on the box). Personal Finance is also mentioned, although not shown (but there is a mockup on the Tutor box also).

  Under Joy Sticks, the Pamphlet mentions "dig for gold" (undoubtedly Demon Diggers, which never made it to the USA), and "catch a shooting star" (unclear which, if any, title this refers to -- possibly NightFlight or even Jack In The Box, but neither title was announced in the USA market). The others ("hungry wolves" and "octopus") are obviously Pooyan and Deep Six, respectively.

  Finally, the pigtailed girl in the center is in front of the Mt Fuji picture from one of the Pyuuta cassette tapes, which was never released in the United States either. All of these entries are in the Tomy Tutor Catalogue.

• It isn't known exactly when in 1983 the Pamphlet first appeared, but the date of December 31, 1983 for the end of the "home tire kicking" offer seems very late in the lifecycle, especially as Federated and other liquidators were known to be blowing out Tutor stock in early 1984. Similarly it's not clear if the Cartridge precedes or follows the Pamphlet, but it seems reasonable to conclude that the Cartridge was written first to get it in the widest selection of stores, especially since it largely already existed in similar form in the Japanese market.