Captain Quirk writes "Color 80 was a BBS written in "Color Basic", Tandy's brand of BASIC. It used a machine language layer that converted all incoming text to lower case and all outgoing text to upper case. Since Color Basic could not process keywords in lowercase callers, even if successful in "crashing" the BASIC program could not get access to the system. The BBS ran on one 180K floppy Disk Drive.

"I was one of the first Sysops using this software and ran a BBS called "The L.A. (Los Angeles) Color Connection" in the early 1980's. The software arrived with a cute story called "Save the Nauga's" written as DATA lines inside the program. It featured a 60 (sixty!) message file that had to be refomated when full, erasing all messages.

"I personaly found the message base to be unsatisfactory, so undertook to rewrite the message section. My changes wrote message 61 over the top of message 1, 62 over 2 and so on. While the message base was still small, at least I didn't have to throw away all messages when sixty was hit. I forwarded my changes to the author, who incorporated them into Color 80 ver 1.1 and started paying me a royality for sales after that!

"The L.A. Color Connection died after two major problems occured. First one was when track seventeen of one of my drives ( I was running two by then for more message base space) peeled right off the disk. Seventeen held the sector data, and left the disk unreadable. I've never seen anything like it since... I stripped the floppy out of it's sleave and could see light through the disk right where track seventeen should have been! Second one was when my Co-sysop was not careful and allow someone to steal his password who then used it to erase the disk drive with program on it, a heavily modded version and my only copy (what can I say? I learned a lesson that day)

Don Brown SYSOP, The L.A. Color Connection BBS, Southgate, Ca 1982 to 1985 (dates approx) AKA, Captain Quirk SYSOP, The Capitol Connection BBS, Salem, OR (WWIV Based) 1990 to 1996