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Telewriter Unwrapped (the hard way)
“There were computers from other companies than Radio Shack?” seems just amusing enough a realisation for me to use it in explanations of how I got to delving into “old computers,” but I do wonder about it oversimplifying things. In any case, there have been things about the particular computer I was using when I came to the realisation just mentioned that I learned well after the fact. It doesn’t seem that many years ago that I was looking at the list of software on a Color Computer archive and really picked up on a program named “TW-80” to the point of wondering about its name. From reading old issues of The Rainbow magazine I’d known about a word processor for the “CoCo” called Telewriter. When The Rainbow’s editorial content had still been dot matrix printout, full-page, typeset ads for Telewriter had promised to transcend a text display that might seem unpromising for word processing (with sixteen lines of thirty-two characters each and no lowercase, just capital letters in “reverse video” boxes to indicate them) by drawing characters on the highest resolution graphics screen. I’d known how the program had become Telewriter-64 as the Color Computer reached the 8-bit memory limit and then transformed into Telewriter-128 on the Color Computer 3, which had a much improved text display. The not quite in-between number, not mentioned in a Rainbow article on word processors that had shaped my awareness of the options there at the end of the 1980s, tickled my fancy enough to load TW-80 in an emulator. I sorted out it pressed the equally improved graphics of the “CoCo 3” into service.
Going back to The Rainbow, I now found some references to TW-80. As I might have already guessed from its startup screen, it was a third-party patch program for Telewriter-64, the last and most elaborate of several patches from a few programmers. Although it hadn’t quite been the very first word processor upgraded for the Color Computer 3, it had preceded Telewriter-128 by some months. The company that had advertised it as one small entry in a list of programs (which wasn’t quite as distinctive an ad as the official Telewriter ones) had stopped advertising in The Rainbow not that long after Telewriter-128’s appearance, but as it turned out the patch did keep being mentioned in the list of software available from a different company, and one of the farewell testimonials in the final issue of The Rainbow mentioned having been written using TW-80.
Beyond that historical content there was a bit of a puzzle with no documentation for TW-80 available in the Color Computer archive. From the references in The Rainbow I could guess at its enhancements from Telewriter-64, and when I looked at the documentation that was available for an earlier patch I realised the new commands were the same (even though I was looking at the products of two different programmers). A little while later I found a large file archiving some posts from an old Color Computer forum, and I happened to turn up some comments from someone making the modest claim that while he might not have programmed TW-80, he had convinced its programmer to use graphics rather than text mode because he’d found the “80-column font” built into the Color Computer 3 unappealing. (I had supposed before that graphics had been used because this was somehow simpler when starting with Telewriter-64’s own use of graphics. After a while I had sorted out how to switch the screen font in TW-80, which isn’t an effortless process. Some of the fonts provided seem a little overelaborate to me, even if I’m starting to get a sense of how other “8x8 pixel fonts” might be added.)
Sorting out this puzzle had been amusing, but a different daydream started creeping into my mind. Formatting the printout from “pre-WYSIWYG” word processors can be a complicated process, and for whatever reason my thoughts jumped straight to the possibility of using TW-80 as a “plain text editor” and formatting that text with the other and more elaborate “graphics screen word processor” for the Color Computer 3 I’m aware of, Max-10. (To be sure, I’d been just fine writing in Max-10 back in the day, but I am conscious now it doesn’t fit quite as much text on the screen as more austere word processors.) The one problem with proving that possibility was that the different versions of Telewriter hard-wrap their text, “pressing Enter” for you at the end of every line. I can wonder if that helps speed up performance, but revising text does mean commanding “manual rewrap” every so often, and you’d better have already marked your paragraphs with indentations or extra lines between them. Exporting the text file from a Color Computer disk image and using something modern like BBEdit was the first thing that came to mind, but it also seemed a bit of a cheat.
I did recall the BASIC program I’d written at last to read through a file one character at a time and decode “RLE graphics.” Going on from there to write those characters back into another file save for “particular carriage return/line feeds” was a slow process involving numerous trips back to the Disk Extended Color BASIC manual and correcting many bugs, but in the end I had something worked out. It’s another marginal accomplishment, of course. The process of drafting this post in TW-80 at least had me considering the peculiarities of a computer that didn’t have a dedicated backspace key.
Going back to The Rainbow, I now found some references to TW-80. As I might have already guessed from its startup screen, it was a third-party patch program for Telewriter-64, the last and most elaborate of several patches from a few programmers. Although it hadn’t quite been the very first word processor upgraded for the Color Computer 3, it had preceded Telewriter-128 by some months. The company that had advertised it as one small entry in a list of programs (which wasn’t quite as distinctive an ad as the official Telewriter ones) had stopped advertising in The Rainbow not that long after Telewriter-128’s appearance, but as it turned out the patch did keep being mentioned in the list of software available from a different company, and one of the farewell testimonials in the final issue of The Rainbow mentioned having been written using TW-80.
Beyond that historical content there was a bit of a puzzle with no documentation for TW-80 available in the Color Computer archive. From the references in The Rainbow I could guess at its enhancements from Telewriter-64, and when I looked at the documentation that was available for an earlier patch I realised the new commands were the same (even though I was looking at the products of two different programmers). A little while later I found a large file archiving some posts from an old Color Computer forum, and I happened to turn up some comments from someone making the modest claim that while he might not have programmed TW-80, he had convinced its programmer to use graphics rather than text mode because he’d found the “80-column font” built into the Color Computer 3 unappealing. (I had supposed before that graphics had been used because this was somehow simpler when starting with Telewriter-64’s own use of graphics. After a while I had sorted out how to switch the screen font in TW-80, which isn’t an effortless process. Some of the fonts provided seem a little overelaborate to me, even if I’m starting to get a sense of how other “8x8 pixel fonts” might be added.)
Sorting out this puzzle had been amusing, but a different daydream started creeping into my mind. Formatting the printout from “pre-WYSIWYG” word processors can be a complicated process, and for whatever reason my thoughts jumped straight to the possibility of using TW-80 as a “plain text editor” and formatting that text with the other and more elaborate “graphics screen word processor” for the Color Computer 3 I’m aware of, Max-10. (To be sure, I’d been just fine writing in Max-10 back in the day, but I am conscious now it doesn’t fit quite as much text on the screen as more austere word processors.) The one problem with proving that possibility was that the different versions of Telewriter hard-wrap their text, “pressing Enter” for you at the end of every line. I can wonder if that helps speed up performance, but revising text does mean commanding “manual rewrap” every so often, and you’d better have already marked your paragraphs with indentations or extra lines between them. Exporting the text file from a Color Computer disk image and using something modern like BBEdit was the first thing that came to mind, but it also seemed a bit of a cheat.
I did recall the BASIC program I’d written at last to read through a file one character at a time and decode “RLE graphics.” Going on from there to write those characters back into another file save for “particular carriage return/line feeds” was a slow process involving numerous trips back to the Disk Extended Color BASIC manual and correcting many bugs, but in the end I had something worked out. It’s another marginal accomplishment, of course. The process of drafting this post in TW-80 at least had me considering the peculiarities of a computer that didn’t have a dedicated backspace key.
10 R=1:W=1:L$=CHR$(10):C$=CHR$(13):S$=CHR$(32) 20 INPUT "FILE TO DEWRAP";A$ 30 INPUT "OUTPUT FILE";Z$ 40 WIDTH 80 50 OPEN "D",#1,A$,1:L=LOF(1) 60 OPEN "D",#2,Z$,1 70 FIELD #1,1 AS I$ 80 FIELD #2,1 AS O$ 90 GET #1,R 100 IF I$=C$ THEN 140 110 LSET O$=I$:PRINT O$;:PUT #2,W 120 W=W+1:R=R+1:IF R>L THEN 280 130 GOTO 90 140 PRINT 150 R=R+1:IF R>L THEN 280 160 GET #1,R 170 IF I$=C$ THEN 110 180 IF I$=S$ THEN 230 190 LSET O$=S$:PUT #2,W:W=W+1 200 LSET O$=I$:PRINT O$;:PUT #2,W 210 W=W+1:R=R+1:IF R>L THEN 280 220 GOTO 90 230 LSET O$=C$:PUT #2,W:W=W+1 240 LSET O$=L$:PUT #2,W:W=W+1 250 LSET O$=S$:PUT #2,W:W=W+1 260 R=R+1:IF R>L THEN 280 270 GOTO 90 280 CLOSE #1:CLOSE #2