The Rainbow Vol. 09 No. 01 - August 1989 - TRS-80 Color ...

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10 THE RAINBOW August 1989
Eight Years Strong
B
y now, most of you have had a month to pe ru se o ur Eig hth Anni versary Issue last
month and. for long-time reade rs ofT HE RA INBOW, I know some of you wondered
why my column did not mentio n anything about it. W e ll , the truth is that I was
simply confused abo ut the month for whi ch 1 was writing, thinking the column th at ended
up in 1 ul y's issue was for the 1 une issue . Of course, you reall y don ' t need me te lling you
th at the anni versary is upon a ll of us because it says so o n the cover.
As is done every year. the anni versary issue features a surprise. This year it 's a booklet
of O ne-Liners. (Incidenta ll y. if you mi ssed last month's issue , you can still get the bookl et
from us.) I tho ught the booklet was an appropri ate way to celebrate an anni versary (whic h.
except fo r Br te, may make us the longest continuously-published compute r magazine in
the worl d).
I have always been exceptiona ll y partial to One-Liners, pe rh aps, because they hark
back to the earl y days of the Color Computer. when the CoCo came w ith an astonishing
4K of mem ory. By the time the system overhead was accounted fo r. the re was abo ut 2K
fo r program writing. I admit th at 2K is quite a bit mo re th an the average O ne-Line r (or
T wo-Line r), but th e bi g deal in those days was fittin g a usable program in to the avail able
me mo ry.
Nope. those 2K spreadsheet programs were not as fancy as the program s we have
today, but l think if you asked anyone to wri te a program th at would do something '" major"
I ike spreadsheetin g, word processing, data communications or the li ke, and required it to
fit in 2K. you would be laughed out of the door. But it was do ne .
When T HE RA INBOW first started , one of the most-often asked questions was wheth er
the owne r's CoCo was working ri ght because the screen sho wed abo ut 2K memory
avail able and the "salesman to ld me it was a 4K machine." That questi on, o f course, was
repeated when Tandy came o ut w ith the "amazin g'' 16K upg rade and the memory
avai I able was some 14K.
Indeed , I remem ber the clay whe n m y local salesman call ed me to say the 16K upgrade
was in , if I wanted it. I sped home, got my CoCo, and sped over to Rad io Shack on my
lunch hour to have a "full -bl own"Color Computer. The two days ittook to have it in sta ll ed
were among the longest of my I ife!
T he interesting thing is th at I never ran out of mem o ry when I had the 4K CoCo, but
I di d when I got the 16K upgrade . I am sure I simply was m ore careful about w hat I was
writing o n the " little machine ," and fi g ured th e sky was the limit w ith the " bi gger" one.
Of course. I knew a I ittle more about programming by the ti me the upgrade was avai I abl e.
Some earlie r iss ues of T HE RA INBOW had a few interesting debates abo ut programming
structures. But one of the most inte resting debates was the one th at went on in my own
office- whether to com press code in li stings or run it so th at it was easie r to read.
We fin a ll y decided we woul d use the easy-to-read fo rmat for o ur BASIC li sti ngs.
although th at meant we had to reject one o r two programs. In orde r to s imply get them to
fit into the CoCo's memory, the authors would pack the li stings, e liminatin g the spaces
between keywords.
We tho ught an importa nt part of o ur job was to teach o ur reade rs a li ttl e something
about how programs worked, and if it was hard (or, sometimes, a lm ost impossibl e) to read
them . it woul d be diffi cult at best to f ig ure o ut the logic of what the w rite r was try ing to
do. W e have kept that gene t·al philosophy up to the present day.
The exception to th at rul e. o f course, is o ur One-Liners (and Two-Line rs). But each is
an exercise in programming skill s, and it reall y isn't hard to fo ll ow a sing le line's logic.
A nd, too. they do remind us o f o ur earl y days with CoCo, where every byte was precio us.
- Lonnie Fa lk