The Rainbow

~ the obit ~

The Rainbow was a monthly about one computer, the TRS-80 Color Computer, and it ran from July 1981 to May 1993. Lawrence C. Falk, who everybody called Lonnie, started it and published it through his own company, Falsoft, out of Prospect, Kentucky. It carried the ISSN 0746-4797 and it carried a mascot. Not many computer magazines bothered with a mascot.

The first issue was two double-sided sheets run off on a Radio Shack Line Printer VII. Falk photocopied twenty five of them and sold them for a dollar, then made ten more when the first batch went. By the third issue there were paid ads in it, from The Micro Works and from JARB Software. The first anniversary issue was professionally typeset with a full-color cover, December 1982 was the first one with a perfect-bound spine, and the operation moved into commercial space early in 1983 before settling into the renovated basement of Falk's house.

From there it stopped being only a magazine. Rainbowfest, its own series of Color Computer conventions, started in 1983. Program listings could be bought on cassette or floppy as Rainbow on Tape and Rainbow on Disk. There were more than a dozen books and a certification seal that software houses started putting on their boxes. A licensed edition was printed in Australia so that Australian subscribers were not paying for airmail.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ four pages to four hundred ~

The farewell issue describes the arc in its own words: the magazine grew "from four dot-matrix-printed pages to nearly 400 typeset pages with full-color covers". A back-issue advertisement a few pages later puts the same range as "our very first, four-page issue to many with more than 300 pages of material," and was selling every one of them off at two dollars apiece.

The same issue is where the geography is recorded. Falk writes that subscribers came from every continent including Antarctica, and that the office had to go and find local speakers of Arabic and Russian to translate reader mail. One grandfather bought ten subscriptions so each grandchild would get one. He claims at least two marriages that came out of people meeting through the magazine. The ceremony for one of them was nearly held at a Rainbowfest, until the bride's parents objected strongly.

One of the tribute writers in the same issue counts at least five different versions of the machine's CPU across the years the magazine covered it, listing the CoCo 1, the CoCo 2 and its direct-video revision, the TDP 100 and the CoCo 3. Falk's closing editorial insists that "the passing of THE RAINBOW in no way marks the passing of the CoCo," and the tribute pages behind it list the user groups and disk magazines ready to pick the work up. Nobody in that farewell issue writes about the computer. They all write about the magazine.

~ what falk wrote in may 1993 ~

The reason is in the editorial and it is unusually blunt for a goodbye. "THE RAINBOW has survived this long simply because we were willing to spend profits from our other Tandy magazine, PCM, to sustain it. Today, with its subscription base ever-shrinking, even our in-place economics are insufficient to keep THE RAINBOW going." Then: "Like Old Dog Tray, the ever-faithful rainbow ceases to exist with this issue. I love this dear magazine that was born so small, grew so large, and has become so small again." The issue's own numbers do not reconcile with each other. It claims three-quarters of a million people welcomed the magazine into their homes every month, which is a reach figure rather than a print run and sits oddly beside Falk's address to "you few thousand who are still with us." It also counts 154 consecutive months from July 1981, where the dates on its own masthead give 143. Remaining subscriptions were converted to PCM, and the Rainbow on Tape and Rainbow on Disk subscribers were moved onto PCM on Disk.

A Radio Shack storefront is the first thing a magazine like this needs, and the nearest one to me was in a different country. The final issue shipped in May 1993; the first web page I ever loaded was five years after that. Falk was elected mayor of Prospect in November 1993, six months after shutting the magazine, and he stayed in the office until he died of a heart attack in June 2006 at sixty three. The falsoft.com domain is parked and for sale now. The entire run is scanned at the Color Computer Archive and on archive.org. Most of the titles it shared a newsstand with did not get that.

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