''Compu-Read'' is an

educational program An educational program is a program written by the institution or ministry of education which determines the learning progress of each subject in all the stages of formal education. See also *Philosophy of education *Curriculum In education, ...

originally developed by Sherwin Steffin of Edu-Ware Services in 1979 for the

Apple II The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-m ...

. It consists of four modules training the user in rapidly increasing comprehension and retention: Character Recognition, High-speed word recognition, Synonyms; Sentence Comprehension. In each, the user the initial difficulty level, and the computer matches the display speed to the user's performance. Steffin first wrote ''Compu-Read'' as a

text-based In computing, text-based user interfaces (TUI) (alternately terminal user interfaces, to reflect a dependence upon the properties of computer terminals and not just text), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an ear ...

program while serving as a research analyst at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

. The first version was published by

Programma International Programma International was one of the first personal computer software publishers. Established in the late 1970s by David Gordon, it published a line of approximately 300 game, programming utility, and office productivity products for the Appl ...

but after being laid off from the university, he revised ''Compu-Read'' and used it to launch his new company, Edu-Ware. Edu-Ware upgraded the program to high resolution graphics using its EWS3 graphics engine in 1981, renamed it ''Compu-Read 3.0'' and ported it to the

Atari 8-bit family The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers introduced by Atari, Inc. in 1979 as the Atari 400 and Atari 800. The series was successively upgraded to Atari 1200XL , Atari 600XL, Atari 800XL, Atari 65XE, Atari 130XE, Atari 800XE, ...

Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness ...

, and

IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...

. ''Compu-Read'' was featured in Edu-Ware's catalogs until its closure in 1985.

References

* * Apple II software Atari 8-bit family software Commodore 64 software Edu-Ware educational software {{edu-videogame-stub