It's easy mocking what people wrote about computers 25 years ago, but even as a green teenager there was an abundance of face palming shortly after taking the magazines out of the mailbox each month.

I had subscriptions - mostly gifts - to several magazines back when type-in listings were a big thing, always hoping there'd be stuff as entertaining as the $30 programs I couldn't afford. After spending a couple of days typing and inevitably experiencing disappointment there wasn't much to do for four weeks except read the articles, even though as a juvie it made about as much sense as perusing pornography for that purpose.

Over time I warmed to it, however, and learned two very different sets of knowledge. Besides the stuff about computers that was useful, there was a great microcosm of contemporary commercial, political and social impurities. Rave reviews of crappy DOA products (PC Jr., anyone?), rants about computers being the death of decent society and fanboys responding to the slightest criticism of equipment with scathing personal attacks all became familiar - and remain comfortably so today..

My longest running subscription was to the TRS-80 Color Computer magazine The Rainbow, started in 1981 by a guy who cranked out two-page photocopies at a drug store and wound up lasting a dozen mostly lucrative years. At one point the monthly issues were well in excess of 300 pages and, unlike other monster publications like Computer Shopper, the ratio of editorial content remained relatively high.

Just not always the most intelligent or ethical stuff in print.

The stupidity in the pages of The Rainbow is common to plenty of computing magazines and many other infamous favorites will be visited in time, but for the moment I'm going to blog a single issue to illustrate the many, many ways embarrassment is possible. The May 1984 issue came in the midst of the CoCo's peak, such as it was, just shy of the magazine's third anniversary.

(Disclosure: I have every issue of The Rainbow published, many purchased a second time on eBay for outrageous amounts to replace lost originals, making my "hater" credentials dubious. Furthermore, I submitted a number of articles to this and other publications, all of one being rejected, so my own insight was apparently even worse).

A running set of 12 themes defined the issues and May was the printer issue, meaning the type-in listings were heavy on things like screen dumps of graphics screens, mailing label databases and banner generators. Every single damn year.

We're skipping a lot of pages, but the first inside one is a full-page ad by Computer Plus that's often used as a "price" reference because it ran a listing of major hardware and software items in that space during most of The Rainbow's life. A 16K standard BASIC CoCo was $135, a 64K extended BASIC version $210 (the original 1980 CoCo was a 4K standard model for $399). This is useful knowledge when looking at some of the add-ons companies thought people would be willing to buy.

A few pages later the "what are they thinking" ads start with a company selling hard drive packages for $1,295 (5 MB) and $1,595 (10 MB). The economy of scale issues alone ought to have scared off potential buyers, but anyone investigating beyond the plug-and-play promises in the ad copy discovered immense and expensive hardships getting the crippled CoCo hardware to make use of that space (among other things, the drive had to be partitioned into virtual "floppies" of 156 KB each).

Letters to the editor start the actual content and, in-between shameless fawns for the magazine and various software companies, is Dylan Krider, 13, despairing about the ignorance of his teachers when the school's computers break down. ""They have blamed this on the PEEKS and POKES of our programs. So we have three angry teachers and some poor kids who are being punished for it. I told them it was impossible for the program to hurt the computer...But being that I'm a kid, I guess they started telling me how wrong I was."

(While the teachers almost certainly were misguided, it's interesting to note the CoCo was one of the few computers besides the Commodore PET that could be damaged through software. Similar to the PET's "killer POKE," a command that would speed up the CoCo processor beyond its tested limit could in theory damage chips).

Next is another ad from the heap of Misguided Entrepreneurs, this time a CP/M hardware expansion selling for $300, or around $500 if you want Wordstar and one or two other pieces of software. To use it, however, requires a video monitor and a special adaptor (since the CoCo is only designed for TVs) costing roughly $200 (monochrome) or $400 (color, if you don't want to keep two displays so the rest of your programs can be used normally). Also needed is a floppy disk drive - another $300, although it has to be assumed anyone looking at the CP/M pack already has one.

Nearing the end of the letters section is a situation familiar to many of today's disgruntled users. Lawrence Snyder of Norristown, Penn., says the $80 he paid for an accounting program is "quite high compared to other similar utilities" and, worse, nobody at the company will even talk to him without a VISA number so they can charge a $20 customer service fee. John Watkin, a company official given a chance to respond, claims fewer than 25 percent of buyers make inquiries and, instead of making everyone pay $100, the policy is to "let the end user decide if he or she wanted to pay for technical support." This is one of those times I wish I'd been eavesdropping in whatever room company officials decided customers would feel amicable, rather than totally screwed, by such policies.

Editor Lonnie Faulk's monthly column following the letters is typical self-agrandizing crap, which much of the time is mixed with shrill propaganda for all things CoCo and scorn for rivals. Supposedly he once worked for UPI, astounding given how poorly he writes and loose he plays with facts. This month's focus is about hosting yet another great RAINBOWfest (which in fairness were valued trade shows for a community with few alternatives) and how a hot discussion topic was whether arcade games should be "winnable."

"Do we want our children (and ourselves, who play these games, too) to always be 'losers' no matter how proficient we become?" he wrote. "Is it that important to be able to win all the time - or at least, have the chance to win?"

Getting beyond the opinions there's a do-it-yourself memory upgrade guide, a reminder of the frequent corrections I saw for various hardware projects appearing a few months later. A screwup in a software type-in listing is a nuisance, but hardware mistakes obviously run the risk of serious damage.

An education column has an interesting stat: 37.5 percent of college freshmen have written a computer program (43.6 percent of men, 31.6 percent of women). That's an area where computer literacy has certainty decreased during the past 25 years. Also, the author notes in a correction that disk drives of then-modern mainframe computers contain a gigabyte, not a googlebyte, of storage. Anybody want to lay over/under odds on the year a googlebyte drive is reality?

Time for another mind boggler of an ad, this time for a "sale" on a suite of seven accounting programs including a general ledger for $185 instead of $249 and payroll database for $225 instead of $295. You also needed to buy a separate "professional" operating system, along with having two disc drives, an 80-column hardware card, a monitor with the appropriate adaptor. The only question remaining is if someone can top the bill for all that - I'm guessing $2,500 or so - by the end of the issue..

I'm not sure which sex to feel more embarrassed for after reading a "women and computing" column where one woman tells the author "unless it can run the sweeper, there is no way it could help me at all." Others bitch about how sports at least are limited to seasons, but the computer is always there to occupy a guy's attention. Also, "lots of women I speak with seem to be turned off by games," they prefer paper for balancing checkbooks and "there was a fraction who were definitely afraid of the computer."

Next is my favorite part of every issue: Reviewing Reviews. This month's collection of responses is an all-time classic, beginning with one of the most thorough displays of self-destruction ever.

A poor review of the adventure game "Mansion Of Doom" incites an insulting and fiction-filled rant by the company's Leroy Smith. In response to the game's limited vocabulary: "If Mr. Gani kept using TAKE instead of GET, then I'd say he has a personal semantic flexibility problem." In response to the lack of a "save" feature, the company's alleged research finds "most people would rather try to solve an Adventure from start to finish" without saving. In response to a presumed error, a screaming-in-italics "Pal Creations' programs do not have bugs!" Finally, an "amazed" response to the opinion that at $15 it's overpriced "since marketing experts throughout the country kept urging us to raise the prices on all our fine 32K Adventures from $24.95 to $29.95 to be in the same price range as Adventures that are inferior to ours." Not only wouldn't I buy this program, I wouldn't touch anything a company thinking such obvious lies are going to win customers over.

Next is a legitimate beef about an online terminal program that exposes a common Rainbow problem: "Your often 'goody goody' reviews, obviously intended not to offend your advertisers, are a disservice to your readers and to improving the products." A second letter about the review states "I feel sure that there is no way Mr. Reed or Rainbow would publish a bad review of any Softlaw product." An editor's note, responding to a long list of complaints about things such as not being able to establish reliable modem connections and use printer functions, states the program is no longer copy protected and "this should alleviate several of the aforementioned problems."

Finally in this section is a case of stupidity due to excessive intelligence. Marty Goodman, a CoCo legend who consulted the programmers of a drawing application, complains "my one overall criticism of the review was that it made Graphicom sound a lot more complex than it really is." That said, he also "personally highly recommend(s) that purchasers of Graphicom make their own custom joysticks" with two buttons or a footswitch to deal with the fact you often need to hold one button down and click another while drawing with the joystick (this was well before the days of the two-button mouse).

Negative reviews, as already noted, were exceeding rare and the editors went to embarrassing lengths to distract readers from the few printed.

Consider this summary of an $8 calculator program written in BASIC able to do only the four basic functions to six digits and two decimal points (far less than possible simply by typing an equation such as "PRINT 12345678/123"): "All in all, I can't imagine any reason to buy this program." The headline above this scather of a review? "Number-Kruncher Good For Basic Math."

Another assessment of a disk utility "if you have never written a BASIC program and you have never read your disk system's owner's manual, then you might want to consider buying it." The headline is "DRB Utility Is Reasonably Priced."

Finally worth mentioning in the reviews section is a critique of the game Foodwar, an unauthorized port of Atari's Food Fight that the author calls "very unique." Setting aside the awful writing as evidenced by the redundancy of the phrase, such reviews by people who never played the original arcade version of a game - or any game, at times - was so common it was a surprise to see someone actually able to describe the quality of the port. Usually the "review" was little more than a how-to-play summary ending with some variation on "Great game. Buy it."

The final section of The Rainbow was devoted to various technical columns and articles. In keeping with their advertising-friendly tone, this month's features included a long column by the seller of one of the "professional" operating systems going on a long rant trashing the competition. Both were basically laughable flops relative to the CoCo's capabilities and intended audience, but the author's system (FLEX) was all but dead at the time while the competition (OS9) would be forced on developers by Tandy for the next six years..

And as we come to the final pages we have a winner in the most expensive and absurd ad sweepstakes. A company selling a "professional" FLEX system is asking a mere $12,398.79 for a system with 256K of memory and 53MB of hard disk space. Another 256K of RAM was a mere $1,900. After that, the hundreds of dollars per software application surely must have seemed like peanuts.