Crank it to the Max(-10)
Jul. 15th, 2023 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerDabbling in some of the earliest word processing programs for microcomputers, and experimenting with Color Computer graphics before that, had been meant to lead to something combining and enhancing both those things, something from my own experience. A lot of my “fiddling around with old computers” amounts to trying to experience things I was oblivious of at the time (I suppose taking interest in the English-speaking anime fans of the 1980s and early 1990s is similar), but every so often I do get back to something I actually remember.
Once upon a time, if I wanted to “tell a story myself,” I’d draw pictures. After a few years, I added speech balloons. A while later, I began drawing more than one picture on each sheet of paper. Eventually and unfortunately, though, I stopped drawing rather than practice until I could draw things that “looked right” to my developing judgment. Before that moment I had printed by hand, but I’d also typed things out (“hunting and pecking” with one finger) on an actual typewriter, and a manual model to boot, a rickety portable my mother had used back in school. I suppose that experience, and more typing on a daisy-wheel electric typewriter we bought just perhaps because it was quicker for certain things than starting up a word processor and looked sharper than what our low-end dot matrix printers produced, gave me some appreciation of being able to go back and correct typos. Even so, I didn’t move beyond occasional sallies to really start typing on a computer until late in the 1980s. By that point, the state of the art had advanced some ways (as I got to the point of pecking with two fingers).
My family had a word processor for our Color Computer 3 called “Max-10,” released by a company that had already produced a MacPaint clone called “CoCo Max.” The half-dozen other word processors for that computer used its new 80-column text screen, getting away from small characters drawn in the best graphics mode of the original Color Computer to transcend its cramped and caps-only text screen. Max-10 stuck with the overhead of graphics, but with it you could format your text right on screen, changing fonts and style; obviously enough, it was a MacWrite clone (if at a moment when that proof-of-concept word processor had just about passed from the Macintosh scene).
I made “disk images” of my old Max-10 diskettes some years ago (preserving the two and a half “books” I completed of what would have been an eight-volume opus, if not a very good story in retrospect), but it’s not an easy program to return to. To offer a mouse-driven interface it made use of a “high-resolution joystick interface.” MAME emulates that extra bit of hardware, but as “emulation of computers” was moved from the standalone MESS to the wider-ranging MAME some sort of bug crept into the program, and typing anything into Max-10 with its default “keyclick” on produces buzzing from the speaker that doesn’t stop. As for using actual hardware, the high-resolution joystick interface plugs into not just a joystick port but the cassette port too, and I’d been using that cassette port to bootstrap the “Drivewire” program that lets me use disk images. When I did get an SD card reader that plugs into the side expansion port not that many years ago I did manage to run Max-10 at last, but that still means setting up a lot of hardware for a limited dose of nostalgia.
When I saw a different emulator, VCC, was beginning to offer the high-resolution joystick interface at last, that got my attention. Once I had a new version running via Wine I was able to load Max-10, but here I found I couldn’t type anything at all. Checking the code repository on GitHub I did notice comments about this problem and then notes about bug fixes, but a revised version didn’t show up. At last, I started thinking about the copy of Windows 7 I’d installed via “Boot Camp” on an old MacBook Pro and the development environment VCC was said to be built in. Tracking that program of considerable size down and installing it, I pushed the button to start building and hoped, which is pretty much all I can do on whatever platform.
I wound up with a running program, though, and when I loaded Max-10 I found I could type into it. My ultimate dream for the moment was to write a draft of this post in the emulated word processor. While I might type better than I did when I first used Max-10 (I took keyboarding in high school using electric typewriters that included Selectrics, although for a little while I was using all the fingers on my left hand but still just one finger of my right), I was still making occasional typos and wondering if even the revision that let me type at all missed characters every once in a while. That pointed out that while the original Macintosh keyboard didn’t have arrow keys, the Color Computer keyboard didn’t have a dedicated backspace key such that Max-10 knocked out the arrow keys for the sake of using one of them as a backspace. “How can you be productive when you have to take your hands off the keyboard?” had been a dig at the early Macintosh, and I suppose there were condescending comments about Max-10 in ads and letters alike in the Color Computer magazine The Rainbow. For that matter, I did manage to use one of its more conventional word processors when my father got me a Color Computer 3 of my own, but one that started off without the expanded memory Max-10 worked best with. Beyond that, I’m conscious there are fewer lines of text on-screen than even the original Macintosh displayed, which makes it a bit tricky to take in wider sweeps of thought, and the mouse pointer doesn’t drop out of sight when you’re typing but rather flickers. Maybe one useful thing about looking back like this is understanding things have improved since then.
Once upon a time, if I wanted to “tell a story myself,” I’d draw pictures. After a few years, I added speech balloons. A while later, I began drawing more than one picture on each sheet of paper. Eventually and unfortunately, though, I stopped drawing rather than practice until I could draw things that “looked right” to my developing judgment. Before that moment I had printed by hand, but I’d also typed things out (“hunting and pecking” with one finger) on an actual typewriter, and a manual model to boot, a rickety portable my mother had used back in school. I suppose that experience, and more typing on a daisy-wheel electric typewriter we bought just perhaps because it was quicker for certain things than starting up a word processor and looked sharper than what our low-end dot matrix printers produced, gave me some appreciation of being able to go back and correct typos. Even so, I didn’t move beyond occasional sallies to really start typing on a computer until late in the 1980s. By that point, the state of the art had advanced some ways (as I got to the point of pecking with two fingers).
My family had a word processor for our Color Computer 3 called “Max-10,” released by a company that had already produced a MacPaint clone called “CoCo Max.” The half-dozen other word processors for that computer used its new 80-column text screen, getting away from small characters drawn in the best graphics mode of the original Color Computer to transcend its cramped and caps-only text screen. Max-10 stuck with the overhead of graphics, but with it you could format your text right on screen, changing fonts and style; obviously enough, it was a MacWrite clone (if at a moment when that proof-of-concept word processor had just about passed from the Macintosh scene).
I made “disk images” of my old Max-10 diskettes some years ago (preserving the two and a half “books” I completed of what would have been an eight-volume opus, if not a very good story in retrospect), but it’s not an easy program to return to. To offer a mouse-driven interface it made use of a “high-resolution joystick interface.” MAME emulates that extra bit of hardware, but as “emulation of computers” was moved from the standalone MESS to the wider-ranging MAME some sort of bug crept into the program, and typing anything into Max-10 with its default “keyclick” on produces buzzing from the speaker that doesn’t stop. As for using actual hardware, the high-resolution joystick interface plugs into not just a joystick port but the cassette port too, and I’d been using that cassette port to bootstrap the “Drivewire” program that lets me use disk images. When I did get an SD card reader that plugs into the side expansion port not that many years ago I did manage to run Max-10 at last, but that still means setting up a lot of hardware for a limited dose of nostalgia.
When I saw a different emulator, VCC, was beginning to offer the high-resolution joystick interface at last, that got my attention. Once I had a new version running via Wine I was able to load Max-10, but here I found I couldn’t type anything at all. Checking the code repository on GitHub I did notice comments about this problem and then notes about bug fixes, but a revised version didn’t show up. At last, I started thinking about the copy of Windows 7 I’d installed via “Boot Camp” on an old MacBook Pro and the development environment VCC was said to be built in. Tracking that program of considerable size down and installing it, I pushed the button to start building and hoped, which is pretty much all I can do on whatever platform.
I wound up with a running program, though, and when I loaded Max-10 I found I could type into it. My ultimate dream for the moment was to write a draft of this post in the emulated word processor. While I might type better than I did when I first used Max-10 (I took keyboarding in high school using electric typewriters that included Selectrics, although for a little while I was using all the fingers on my left hand but still just one finger of my right), I was still making occasional typos and wondering if even the revision that let me type at all missed characters every once in a while. That pointed out that while the original Macintosh keyboard didn’t have arrow keys, the Color Computer keyboard didn’t have a dedicated backspace key such that Max-10 knocked out the arrow keys for the sake of using one of them as a backspace. “How can you be productive when you have to take your hands off the keyboard?” had been a dig at the early Macintosh, and I suppose there were condescending comments about Max-10 in ads and letters alike in the Color Computer magazine The Rainbow. For that matter, I did manage to use one of its more conventional word processors when my father got me a Color Computer 3 of my own, but one that started off without the expanded memory Max-10 worked best with. Beyond that, I’m conscious there are fewer lines of text on-screen than even the original Macintosh displayed, which makes it a bit tricky to take in wider sweeps of thought, and the mouse pointer doesn’t drop out of sight when you’re typing but rather flickers. Maybe one useful thing about looking back like this is understanding things have improved since then.