1 November 2026
Latest
Prism v0.2.1 — a typeface of its own
Prism’s interface now speaks in Prism Sans, a font drawn specifically for the shell. Before drawing it, the builders tried every stock font EOU carries — each one was found wanting: spindly, blobby, small-caps, or clean but in a cell too wide for Prism’s layout. So a new one was made by hand: five-pixel glyphs, drawn seven rows tall inside the standard cell, with a dotted zero.
The difference is visible everywhere text appears — menu bar, directory windows, status line, clock. The previous font remains available: pick Narrow Font in the View menu any time; Prism Font brings the new face back. This is v0.2.1, verified running on the project’s test rig.
1 November 2026
Prism v0.2 — double-click fixed, programs launch
The big one. Double-clicking works — on drive icons, on folders, and on programs, which now launch for real instead of sitting there as pictures. The bug was found the honest way: hands-on testing at a real desk said double-click did nothing, and the hunt ended in the mouse driver’s click count, which reports three after a double-click, not two. The fix defers the selection highlight until the double-click window has passed.
Also in v0.2: windows drag by their title bars, a genuine shell window from the Special menu, the Prism launcher button at bottom-left, a menu-bar clock showing hours and minutes, and a new identity that is Prism’s own — flat colours, drawn hardware icons for floppy and hard drives, an amber signature band. The screen settles at 640 × 200, the widest mode EOU offers.
1 November 2026
Prism v0.1 — first light
The shell’s first working version, running on NitrOS-9 EOU: a menu bar (Prism, File, View, Special), drive icons down the right of a 640-wide desktop, directory windows listing a drive’s real contents, and a mouse pointer driving all of it. Two themes from day one — a curated colour theme and Classic Mono — switchable live from the View menu.
Program launching was still a stub and the icons were simple line drawings, but the shape of the thing was on the screen and verified: the CoCo 3, wearing a desktop.
1 November 2026
A desktop for the CoCo 3 — the project begins
Keith Clark of Rodney, Ontario commissions a Finder-style graphical shell for the TRS-80 Color Computer 3 — written from scratch, in the open, as a free gift to the CoCo community. The brief came from putting the CoCo’s stock shell beside the polished graphical desktops of its era and deciding the hardware deserved better.
The project is called Prism. Its source will be published under the MIT licence when the first release ships, and this site is its home. Welcome — mind the pins.