Back Along The Rainbow
Jan. 23rd, 2026 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWith my parents downsizing, one of the things I took custody of was our partial run (if one that spanned almost ten years) of the Color Computer magazine The Rainbow. Once I’d brought the file boxes of it to my own place after Christmas, I did get to thinking about how each month I “go back forty years,” pick up some of the old magazines already ready to my hand, and leaf through 80 Micro and Macworld. There have been months I’ve needed most of their days to get to the end of those two issues, so I did wonder whether revisiting another antique magazine was the wisest use of my time. It didn’t take me that long to skim the January 1986 80 Micro, though, so I went ahead and extracted the Rainbow issue for the same month.
January was labelled the “Beginners Issue” for most of The Rainbow’s run, so this issue did seem an appropriate starting point at least. I’ll admit to thinking I was paying a bit more attention to the ads than to the introductory articles, though, which might even have contrasted to impressions I sort of skip over many of the old ads in the other two magazines even though they might represent their time that much better than the articles. In the case of The Rainbow, that particular balance could have come from a certain familiarity with the magazine. While I’d left it at my parents as opposed to taking the 80 Micro issues from there years ago or going to lengths to buy back issues of Macworld, that had something to do with scanned versions of it having come to my attention before I found the same thing done for those other magazines.
As for the ads in The Rainbow themselves, I’d started into this issue with the impression they were less polished than most of the ads in a magazine like Macworld, or an Apple II magazine, or even many of the ads in a Commodore magazine. This might then tie into feelings the Color Computer was somehow a “computing backwater,” lasting for around as long as the other “8-bit computers” but not noticed all that much from the outside. For all of that, the issue of The Rainbow I picked up was of reasonable thickness compared to my impressions of many other computer magazines of about the same vintage. What has to be acknowledged there, though, is how it didn’t have all that much competition in its market. The last magazine even somewhat comparable to it, “HOT CoCo,” stopped being published in February 1986.
I did manage to think of one thing I hadn’t quite had in mind before starting into the issue. The ads didn’t have much of an emphasis on “games.” Self-deprecation kicks in when supposing the audiovisual hardware of the Color Computer was pretty much the minimum common denominator for “colour computers” of the 1980s, but it still got my attention that the age of “arcade knockoffs in a fixed palette of white, black, red, and blue” seemed to have faded. “Illustrated adventures” and wargames did catch my eye, though.
I also happened to see a few applications that ran under OS-9 promoted. After “Extended Color BASIC has plenty of graphics commands” and “the 6809 is an impressive microprocessor,” both promotions that might seem to amount to “who cares about all the commercial programs for other machines when you can write your own programs!”, OS-9 seemed to amount to another talking point, but I’m forever admitting an impression that most of its coverage (including a “getting started” article in this very issue) seemed to stop at the point of “running it,” rather than getting “running programs with it.” Anyway, I was a bit intrigued by an article near the “more advanced” back end of the magazine where William Barden, Jr. started off trying to get Japanese characters onto a Color Computer screen. He had trouble with uneven inputs from most of the devices that plugged into the joystick ports, then mentioned how the MacPaint knockoff CoCo Max came with a cartridge that allowed every pixel of the highest resolution mode to be addressed before saying he hadn’t actually tried that program. In finishing the issue I did get to thinking I wouldn’t mind dropping in on other ones in the months to come; 1986 did mark a big change for the Color Computer.
January was labelled the “Beginners Issue” for most of The Rainbow’s run, so this issue did seem an appropriate starting point at least. I’ll admit to thinking I was paying a bit more attention to the ads than to the introductory articles, though, which might even have contrasted to impressions I sort of skip over many of the old ads in the other two magazines even though they might represent their time that much better than the articles. In the case of The Rainbow, that particular balance could have come from a certain familiarity with the magazine. While I’d left it at my parents as opposed to taking the 80 Micro issues from there years ago or going to lengths to buy back issues of Macworld, that had something to do with scanned versions of it having come to my attention before I found the same thing done for those other magazines.
As for the ads in The Rainbow themselves, I’d started into this issue with the impression they were less polished than most of the ads in a magazine like Macworld, or an Apple II magazine, or even many of the ads in a Commodore magazine. This might then tie into feelings the Color Computer was somehow a “computing backwater,” lasting for around as long as the other “8-bit computers” but not noticed all that much from the outside. For all of that, the issue of The Rainbow I picked up was of reasonable thickness compared to my impressions of many other computer magazines of about the same vintage. What has to be acknowledged there, though, is how it didn’t have all that much competition in its market. The last magazine even somewhat comparable to it, “HOT CoCo,” stopped being published in February 1986.
I did manage to think of one thing I hadn’t quite had in mind before starting into the issue. The ads didn’t have much of an emphasis on “games.” Self-deprecation kicks in when supposing the audiovisual hardware of the Color Computer was pretty much the minimum common denominator for “colour computers” of the 1980s, but it still got my attention that the age of “arcade knockoffs in a fixed palette of white, black, red, and blue” seemed to have faded. “Illustrated adventures” and wargames did catch my eye, though.
I also happened to see a few applications that ran under OS-9 promoted. After “Extended Color BASIC has plenty of graphics commands” and “the 6809 is an impressive microprocessor,” both promotions that might seem to amount to “who cares about all the commercial programs for other machines when you can write your own programs!”, OS-9 seemed to amount to another talking point, but I’m forever admitting an impression that most of its coverage (including a “getting started” article in this very issue) seemed to stop at the point of “running it,” rather than getting “running programs with it.” Anyway, I was a bit intrigued by an article near the “more advanced” back end of the magazine where William Barden, Jr. started off trying to get Japanese characters onto a Color Computer screen. He had trouble with uneven inputs from most of the devices that plugged into the joystick ports, then mentioned how the MacPaint knockoff CoCo Max came with a cartridge that allowed every pixel of the highest resolution mode to be addressed before saying he hadn’t actually tried that program. In finishing the issue I did get to thinking I wouldn’t mind dropping in on other ones in the months to come; 1986 did mark a big change for the Color Computer.