You finally type the last paragraph of a term paper that's kept you up most of the night, save it and stagger to bed for a couple hours' sleep. The next morning when you try to print it out...nothing. The file contains nothing except a blank page. 

(Company's response: Hey, there's (sometimes) a message telling you the file was partially saved, since the program only saves whatever text is after the cursor position. That's not a bug, it's a feature.) 

As this column continues looking at lesser known moments of colossal retrocomputing idiocy, surely this is an abnormal example? OK, cue time warp and try again. 

You finally type the last paragraph...and accidentally hit the ENTER key without typing in a filename at the "save" prompt. Maybe it's fatigue or just the computer's infamous keybounce doing double duty after you ENTERed the save command in the first place. In any event, the computer crashes and the only fix is turning the power off, losing your work. 

(Company's response: Why would somebody press ENTER without entering a filename when prompted to do so? It's your fault, stupid.) 

OK, third time has to be the charm. This time we'll assume the file actually got saved. 

You try printing, but – yikes – there's a power failure. It only lasts a few minutes, so no problem. Except when you try to reload the file you discover the disk has been destroyed by the program. 

(Company's response...actually, maybe now you understand why so many eventually decided to trap customers in automated phone hell.) 

Each of these are real and fatal flaws in early home computer programs easily fixable with literally a line or two of code. They're hardly the worst examples or most crass responses, just what I came up with off the top of my head. 

Asking "what were they thinking" just invites more agony for those victimized. A magazine review of Cosmic Paint for Radio Shack's TRS-80 Color Computer, for instance, criticized a lack of error trapping, but author John Hattan wrote a rebuttal arguing crashes are a good thing. 

"I find it much more convenient for a program to abort with an error message than for it to return to editing without an indication you made a mistake," he wrote. Incorporating ON ERROR statements are "often a simple way to dodge hardware errors by having the program ignore them...some apparent fundamental problems can allow for more user convenience than the first glance shows."

The first example at the beginning of this column was perhaps the most maddening "feature" of VIP Writer, a CoCo word processor I used throughout high school and college. It saved files only from the current cursor position to the end of the text, which seems like something most users would rarely want – and I can't imagine the conversation that resulted in it being the default option. I tend to save every few minutes, so I was constantly scrolling to the top of a document and back to wherever I was at, a maddeningly time-consuming process. But I had a few brain lapses, especially early on, where I wiped everything out by saving while at the end of the file. The program flashes a "file partially saved" message in the upper left corner, but it disappears as soon as you hit a key and in most cases I had already resumed writing. 

Complaints from reviewers and others fell on deaf ears, as updated versions of the product never altered the feature. 

The second above example belongs to TextPro, a word processor whose long existence I never understood. Above all else, it was a line-oriented program. For those not familiar with this particular form of writing hell, it's something novice BASIC programmers wrote in the early days of personal computers that offered barely more usefulness than a typewriter. You type in a line or sentence at a time and press ENTER. Each line is assigned a number. If you want to edit anything, you have to go to a special mode where you provide the line number and retype the text. Inserting, deleting and moving text is pure hell, if it can be done at all. This is just the beginning of the misery, but for the sake of space I'll simply reiterate the commercial value of such programs was low or nonexistent. But TextPro lasted for years despite a premium price tag matching full-featured word processors. One reason was it offered a printer buffer so you could keep writing, but it suffered from a terrible, terrible bug. If anything interrupted the printing process, the file was destroyed because how the buffer was programmed. 

The third example and variations of it afflicted many programs. Saving without filenames, printing without a printer attached, mistyping the name of a file to be loaded from disk or cassette, and other such mishaps all could have been easily corrected. 

A MacPaint clone called CoCo Max allowed files to be saved with names like "1:JUNK," which made them impossible to delete with the CoCo's disk operating system. Despite attention being called to it, the flaw remained when the company released an enhanced second version of the program a year later. 

The tactic of blaming users or denying a problem existed might have been maddening for customers, but made for amusing reading in the letters section of various magazines. I learned more about which companies were worth dealing with there than I ever did from ads or even product reviews. Next month I'll start looking at some of my favorite rebuttals, along with perhaps some amateur psychology of what motivated such responses then and now.

It's a sell-out item," crows a spokesman for Sears, Roebuck & Co. stores in the San Francisco area. "We can't get enough of them," says a representative of Bloomingdale Bros. in New York. "I don't know how many we could have sold if we had had them in stock," wails a buyer for a major West Coast department store chain. The object of these retailers' holiday cheer is yet another consumer product from the high-technology workshops of the electronics industry -- the video game. Still in short supply, electronic games may appear under only a few trees this Christmas. But consumers' eagerness to pay $100 and up to convert their television sets into miniature athletic fields virtually guarantees a rush of competition next year. "The toy and game market is limited only by our imagination," says Scott Brown, consumer marketing director at National Semiconductor Corp. "It can be as big as the calculator market is today."

At the moment only two companies are serious factors in consumer electronic games. One is Magnavox Co., which pioneered the home video game business with its Odyssey system in 1972. The other is Atari Inc., a fledgling company based in Los Gatos, Calif., which up to now has concentrated on the coin-operated amusement business. Atari claims to be turning out more than 3,000 units per day of a consumer version of Pong, its hugely successful coin-operated game. Sears, which so far is the only retailer handling Pong, reports that it is selling "everything we can get." Magnavox introduced an improved version of Odyssey this fall and says it is approaching production of 3,000 units daily.

Follow the leader.

By next year, though, a flood of competitors is expected to pour in as the integrated circuits that run the games get cheaper and more powerful. General Instrument Corp. plans to begin producing early next year an integrated circuit that will control as many as seven different games at a price comparable to present one-game circuits. Atari, for one, is designing a product around the new part. And National Semiconductor, already a power in calculators and watches, is planning its own video game. "Next year," Brown says, "people like us will really go to work on this market."

A big question is whether the entry of National and other semiconductor makers will create the same cut-throat price competition that has bloodied the calculator industry. John Helms, electronic games product manager at Magnavox, is hopeful that the direction will be toward more sophisticated -- and profitable -- games. "With a microprocessor," he says, "it could be a very complex product."

Nolan K. Bushnell, founder and chairman of Atari, claims: "The video game is not a watch or calculator thing. Each year the games will be very different and demand new and more powerful components." With shorter production runs, Bushnell believes, the semiconductor producers will lose their cost advantage over assemblers. "The semiconductor components are only 20% of the cost of a game vs. 60% or more in calculators," he adds.

But this view discounts the potential of the microprocessor, the computer-on-a-chip that is rapidly growing in power and falling in price. Although microprocessors are used in several coin-operated games, they are still too expensive for use in home units. "But prices will fall and capabilities will increase until we are in consumer games too," says A. J. Nichols, manager of microprocessor applications for Intel Corp. The big semiconductor maker has already been sounded out by at least one TV maker that is thinking of incorporating a game device in its set.

Ideas seem to be proliferating for games in which computer circuits generate TV images that players can manipulate with a turn of a knob. Atari is thinking about a home version of Tank, its biggest selling coin-operated game, in which competitors maneuver through minefields while they try to blast each other off the screen.

I now feel I have had time to get my feet wet after this month's publication and am excited for the future. Since publishing the last issue I've had the chance to get better aquatinted with the writers of RTM and hope to serve them well as editor. If anyone out there reading wants to get involved with us and write some articles, all you have to do is send anything you write to me, and as long as it's thought out and well written it will get published. I just wanted to spread the word that everyone has the chance to contribute if they want to, and possibly become part of the staff if they end up doing more than 3 articles. Thanks for a good issue of Retrogaming Times Monthly and hopefully even better/bigger things are soon to follow.

- Bryan Roppolo, Retrogaming Times Monthly Editor