Some 8-bit nostalgia

[dj]

Hi, all:

I was playing around with a virtual emulator for my late, lamented 8-bit Radio Shack Color Computer III (the good old CoCo, circa 1985) and loaded up some music software that I wrote -- in BASIC! -- back then, long before Notation Composer came along. In fact, I think Mark Walsen was still working on Windows 3.0 back then!

I called this little gem Musicscribe and it was a purely graphical notation program: no sound, no MIDI and not much automation.

Although stretched on screen, as shown in this screen grab, the printout was properly sized -- on my old Tandy DMP-105 dot matrix printer, at 300 baud and 127 dpi.

Below that is an example of the same three bars of music in Composer 3.1 -- entered in about 1/10th of the time.

I have no idea why, but I still have a fondness for my old 8-bit computers.

David

[rrayner]

Love it, David. Thanks for sharing. The graphics are neat! It's nice taking a trip down memory lane once in a while - makes us appreciate more what we have now.

Ralph Rayner

[Sherry C]

Hi David,

Whoaaa - that brings back memories of programming in BASIC (and FORTRAN)! And yes, that would have been around the time frame that Mark was working as a Program Manager to bring Windows to the world

That's pretty cool that you were able to program something even then to help with getting notation down for printing. Were you able to insert this within a text field for your performers?

We've come a long way, baby!

ttfn,
Sherry