[Coco] Rediscovering stuff I wrote on the CoCo

[Allen Huffman]

It appears I was more prolific as a teen programmer than I thought. I have found a number of things I wrote that I forgot about:

1. Layaway program - CC3/80 columns custom written for Boots Furniture (it says). I don't remember doing this, but it seems familiar -- just wish I could remember the connection to that store (which I don't remember at all).

2. Tidy Disk - back in the days of using a program to send a full disk over the modem, it would send any non blank sectors so deleted files would get sent taking more time. This program scanned the directory tables and erased all non-used sectors. Today, "secure erase" is built in to modern operating systems. Of interest was a VDG "window" routine I used to pop up overlay windows with shadows for text alerts.

3. Tiny Dump - remember the TP-10 thermal printer? It could print semigraphics style blocks but no dot matrix graphics printing. I wrote a program that dumped a PMODE 4 graphics screen to the TP-1 using those blocks.

4. Pen Pal - after my pen-pal request letter appeared in Rainbow magazine in 1985, I apparently wrote a database program for tracking them. I have about 20 folks in there (one I am in touch with today thanks to Facebook). I am thinking of trying to track down the rest.

5. Paper Route - I custom wrote a database for a lady who distributed newspapers. It seemed to use the same type of engine than Pen Pal used. You could insert people in the order the deliveries went to.

6. The Dirty Story Teller - the credits don't list me by name, only initials and two friends. This thing generated random dirty sentences wrapped as a story ... "And then...". It could use the speech sound pak and/or go to the printer.

7. Music Demo - I put a bunch of songs I entered from sheet music in Musica 2 on a disk with a menu to play one or all (in a loop). The info screens say it was designed for Radio Shacks to demo CoCo music in the stores. In the program is a huge block of comments about why I wrote it, claiming that I was annoyed that everyone thought the CoCo could just make beeps and clicks and I pointed out we could do four voice music and the C64 could only do three. Weird days.

I found a Doctor Who demo that displayed the Tom Baker-era logo and played the theme song, too.

Man, lots of stuff. I'll get it all organized and post some collections in the future. I need to get all these files extracted from the .dsk images, find duplicates, etc. Only things that had to go on the same disk will have to stay together, but it looks like most could be reorganized.

		-- A

...I also found a program that scanned for modem numbers, and one that cracked long distance codes, but I had nothing to do with writing those. Just curious pieces of software I must have found.

		-- A