Some 8-bit nostalgia
 

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

Re: Some 8-bit nostalgia
 

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

Re: Some 8-bit nostalgia
 

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