Ten green bottles standing on the wall... and what do you know, another green bottle has accidentally fallen.

Coleco is the latest casualty. It looks as if all the king's horses and all the king's men would have their work cut out putting the Adam together again. Coleco has abandoned the home computer market, selling its stock off to an optimistic retail chain and turning its attention to the low-tech business of toys.

In Coleco's case it seems that pride came before a fall. The Adam emerged in a blaze of publicity in mid-1983 and Coleco announced that it would have 500,000 on the streets by Christmas. In the event it shipped fewer than 100,000 and lost the sympathy of some important friends in the process.

The biggest boost the machine received in its short career came just after its first Christmas. Coleco signed a deal with Honeywell through which the big computer manufacturer would offer a national service network for Adam owners. Ironically, even this rebounded on the luckless Coleco by drawing attention to the question of reliability.

In quick succession the larger retailer JC Penney cancelled its orders for Adams because the machine failed to meet its quality standards and Consumer Reports magazine refused to rate the Adam because, it said, none of the four early production models it had seen could be coaxed into action. Encouraging comments from Honeywell executives weren't enough to allay public suspicion.

The history of the Adam's freful progress towards the shops was a story of nagging problems and increasingly weighty doubts. The machine promised much, but by the time it was delivered a large credibility gap had opened. The writing was on the wall before it arrived in the UK, and the Adam never made a significant impact here.

There are several strange features in this tale of failure. The Adam wasn't a straightforward home computer - with a built-in daisywheel and a pioneering form of high-speed drive, it offered very much more than the average box. But it wasn't a straightforward business computer either - there were question marks against the reliability and durability of the hardware and against the quality of some of the software. Nor, in its initial form, did it have CP/M.

On the face of it, the Adam fell between two stools. Perhaps it was before its time - as a home micro with the potential for serious applications it was a clear forerunner of such machines of the QL, the Plus/4, and other systems that will emerge during the year as the manufacturers try to persuade us that microcomputers have to develop beyond games to survive.

It was also comparable to the Amstrad, in that it tried to make a splash in a market that was new to the company with a product that offered most of the necessary features in one package.

So will Sinclair, Commodore and Amstrad read the news of the Adam's expulsion from the garden with the feeling that somebody's walking over their graves? It isn't likely. They will console themselves with the thought that Coleco wasn't equipped to enter the home micro market in the first place and that it made mistakes that old hands wouldn't make. They may even gloat at the fact that another loud-mouthed competitor has got his come-uppance.

But Coleco's last words on the Adam are relevant to all micro producers on both sides of the Atlantic. "Rapidly changing consumer preferences, frequent technological developments, overproduction and significant and continuing price-cutting have created an unusually volatile business market which is likely to continue for the near future," the company says. This mouthful means that times are hard for micro makers, and they're not going to get any easier for a while. Coleco, famous for the highly profitable Cabbage Patch dolls, is turning to toys.

Toys are exactly what most of the present crop of micro manufacturers, the remaining green bottles on the wall, are trying to get away from. The image of the home micro as a toy is one that doesn't satisfy them. But the failure of the Coleco Adam shouldn't satisfy any of them, and it indicates that 1985 could be another difficult year.