Interview: DALE LEAR E-Mail: dalelear@crl.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dale Lear, currently aged 47 and living in Austin Texas, is one of the early pioneers in Color Computer software development. Married and with six children ranging from 16 to 24 years of age, he has also had plenty of experience with fatherhood! Dale's programs have always had the distinction of excellence and are some of the most popular, even to many of the remaining Color Computer enthusiasts today! # PROGRAMMING ACHIEVEMENTS Product Title Product Description Year Distributor ------------- ------------------- ---- ----------- Fire Copter Arcade type game 1982 Adventure International DoubleBack Arcade type game 1982 Radio Shack PickWhich Arcade type game 1982 Spectrum Products Color Baseball Arcade/Sports game 1983 Radio Shack TSEdit Text Editor 1983 Radio Shack TSSpell Spell checker utility 1985 Radio Shack TRSCopy Utility 1986 Radio Shack Color Scripsit II Word Processor 1986 Radio Shack DL Logo Programming Language 1987 Radio Shack # INTERVIEW Q: How and when did you become interested in computers? A: Since the first days of programmable calculators I was hooked. I remember being thrilled just to get a calculator to count to 10. Q: What computers have you owned and currently own? A: I have only owned Color Computers and Macs. I use a PC with my current employer, but of course they purchased that. I have yet to send any personal funds Bill's way. Q: What was your favourite computer and why? A: Screenshot of Fire Copter There are two levels to this question. My favorite computer to use to get work done is probably still the Mac. I have done programming for several computers, mostly UNIX boxes, lately... but I started early. Even back to the days of a processor no-one will probably remember.... the Intel 4004 (predecessor to 8008, predecessor to 8080, predecessor to today's Pentium). It was a lot of fun to work at such a low level... but the answer still has to be the one your hoping for.... the Color Computer was the most fun. It was a very enjoyable episode in my programming career. It was computer enough to touch and experience, and yet small enough to still get your brain around the whole machine. Very satisfying. Q: What companies did you work for? A: In my CoCo days I had my own company, creatively named: Dale Lear Software, Inc. Before and since that interlude of independence, I have worked for "Fair Isaac", a company producing decision control software, primarily to the credit industry. Q: How did you get the contract to develop software for Radio Shack? A: I called Tandy in Fort Worth and got information on how to submit programs for review and what they were looking for, etc. I programmed DoubleBack within all of their most desirable guidelines (for example, DoubleBack runs on a 4K machine, which was still owned by many people at the time). I think the real differentiator for me, however, was that I burned a ROM, and submitted the game to Radio Shack for review already on a cartridge. I figured this would let them know that the game was programmed with ROM in mind, it was easy for them to try, and it gave me a bit of creditiblity. The guidelines said wait 30-90 days to hear back... I heard back in about 3 days! That started a long mutual relationship. Q: Did they ask you to develop a certain type of game or did they take anything that you chose to write? A: Baseball was my idea. At that time baseball was kind of being held up as a video game benchmark... it was Intellivision's selling point over Atari. Radio Shack had yet to have any success in programming a playable baseball game, but I was convinced the CoCo could do a better job than either - I was right. Most of the other projects were mutual. I did TSEdit for myself, to have a usable text editor with which to develop. Tandy was interested, and bought the rights. Later they asked me to expand it with the spell checker, and the repackaging into Color Scripsit II. D.L.Logo was also something they particularly requested. Q: Did Radio Shack give you a prototype CoCo3 to work on? A: I received a very early prototype... perhaps one of about 5 or so. It was pretty much like the production unit. Q: Can you tell us any interesting "stories" of your past development days? A: I remember when I was developing TSSpell, I sub-licensed the dictionary and compression algorithms from the people who produced a PC product called PFS Spell. In a technical meeting with them, I was reviewing the architecture of TS/Spell with them, showing them the improvements made through the use of multi-tasking. They had developed PFS Spell in DOS, and they were surprised and questioned, "Multitasking?"... I remember replying "Oh, didn't I mention - OS9 is a REAL operating system!" Q: Are you still developing for the CoCo and why? A: I stopped independent product development in 1988, when the market was shifting and commercial products began emphasizing Mac and PC, and most new products included man-years of development effort, i.e. a one man shop could no longer compete. Since programming was my livelihood, supporting myself and six children, I couldn't afford to work if there was no market for the fruits of my labor... sad but true, there is no longer a market for Color Computer software. Q: What are some of your favourite CoCo products of all time? A: The most elegant product was probably OS9. It was simple, yet so well matched to the machines hardware that it had to be what the 6809 architects had in mind. For my money, it was ten times the OS that DOS was at the time. Beyond that, I had a lot of fun with Temple of ROM, Sands of Egypt, and even my first creation: DoubleBack - a game written in only 4K, but very "playable" and fun, if I do say so. Q: What is your opinion on Software Piracy? A: It takes a lot of diligence to create and package commercial software. The people who put the blood sweat and tears into it should certainly be paid. There is always freeware available from the hobbyists. If you want something more professional, you should pay the professional. Q: What is your opinion of the CoCo2 and CoCo3 hardware platform? A: Screenshot of Baseball They were logical progressions, and of course since my career was at the CoCo, I was more than happy to see the continuing support from Tandy to improve the product. I remember wowing everyone in an on-line chat session the day the CoCo3 was released. I had had one for a while, being a developer for Tandy, and had prepared a file of ASCII characters that painted a picture of the keyboard. During the forum, someone asked what the keyboard looked like, and I was able to dump the picture onto everyone's screen. Yeah...the things we thought where pretty cool then. Q: Was there ever a CoCo4 in the design stages? A: Not to my knowledge. Q: If you were asked by "Mr.Tandy" to create a CoCo4, what would you include? A: I suppose what I would do is keep the CoCo pure... after all, the fun is to push the limits of what you can do with yesterdays technology. I would just add some sort of interface to a Mac or a PC so you could do your development in a more state of the art environment, and then ship it back to the CoCo to run in it's "pure" mode. Make it more of a hobby/learning lab thing. Q: Have you any "words of wisdom" to pass on to any budding CoCo programmers? A: It's wisdom to keep a realistic perspective. The CoCo at this point is for the historian and the hobbyist. Have fun, learn, press the limits... but keep your day job. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interview copyright by Nickolas Marentes - September 3, 1998.