#fred crawford

[krjpalmer]

PCM April 1986

There's no issue of Soft Sector on the Internet Archive for April 1986, so I'm skipping ahead to PCM. Lonnie Falk's editorial in this issue talked about how the mail volume to PCM had been increasing; he was willing to treat it as an affirmative answer to a question he'd been asked about "whether Tandy 'really did' sell more 1000s over the last few months than IBM sold PCs." An article looked at a "wrist terminal" from Seiko (with "a 24-character display"). There was a program for the Model 100 promising modest compression of text files, but also an April Fool's program for it that would unpleasantly surprise someone with the impression their portable had "cold started" and blanked its memory. Two relatively old games, Infidel from Infocom and Wizardry from Sir-Tech, were reviewed; the reviewer didn't seem to have got very far in the text adventure.

[lookcaitlin]

[sandmandaddy69]

Fred Crawford

[krjpalmer]

PCM June 1986

While there was a generic spaceship on the cover of this issue, the feature article inside was clear that its lengthy type-in program put you in command of the USS Enterprise, and in the thick of action without the "batch-type" commands that had been familiar for more than a decade. A "metric calculator" was offered in Pascal, and there was a long program to write machine code for the Model 100's 8085. Lonnie Falk's editorial mentioned he was taking his Tandy 200, with a handicapper program on it, to the Kentucky Derby.

[krjpalmer]

PCM August 1984

The Model 100 hits the beach on this issue's cover; the Tandy 2000 presumably stayed inside regardless of aerial advertising. There's a gap in the availability of PCM issues on the Internet Archive, and this is at one side of the gap. When the magazine does return, things will be different...

[krjpalmer]

PCM May 1984

With the expansion of its title changed, this issue added more coverage of the Tandy 2000, even if part of that coverage was an explanation of how to transfer files from the Model 100 to it.

[krjpalmer]

PCM September 1985

The Tandy 1000's three-voice sound capabilities (courtesy of a Texas Instruments chip and cloned from the IBM PCjr) provided the cover story for this issue. Bill Barden, Jr. framed his article on the topic as a report from "the Orange County Tandy Users Group," with members of "the Orange Apple Computer Club" heckling the lecturer "Guru Dan" throughout. The "no-frills word processor for the Tandy 2000" was called "a word UNprocessor" by its article's author.

[krjpalmer]

PCM July 1984

A regular series of type-in programs to draw flags on the high-resolution colour screen of the Tandy 2000 reached the Olympic flag in this issue. The "ultimate" portable envisioned in one article looked ahead to capabilities both now familiar ("a 24 x 80 fold-up display using a color LCD screen with back-lighting" and "how about a built-in cellular phone or some other method to create a 'wireless modem'?") and perhaps less so ("12 function keys with separate LCD windows" and "a 4-inch laser disk that holds the equivalent of an entire encyclopedia set on a single disk").