The Storyline is a text-handling program that enables a budding Shakespeare to produce some most peculiar, although strangely fascinating, stories. I am sure that the original intention of the program was for the child using it to create sense in a normally acceptable fashion, but the side-effect is that the text produced by the program has a strange surrealist quality about it:

'I rang the bell. Then a thin clown saved me and then the thing dodged it. In the end, it walked out of my head.'

The seven-year-old T S Eliot who created this masterpiece was fascinated by the weird atmosphere and unreal quality that this sort of 'random text' produced. Of course, it need not necessarily be totally random since the child who is using the program governs what goes into it at each stage.

There are two levels of operation, with vocabulary of varying degrees of difficulty. The words to be chosen are flashed one by one on the screen, and you may choose to keep the word by pressing 'X' or try another by pressing any other key.

On pressing 'X' the word is transferred to the top of the screen in the next position available in the sentence under construction. One thing that my test-pilot found to be a problem was that if, in his enthusiasm, he made a wrong choice there was no way of deleting the chosen word - in fact, editing facilities are nil, which severely limits its use. You may send the whole story to the printer at any point or view it on the screen. After printing, the same story may be continued or another started.

The program centres around the use of data, accessed line by line, in a syntactically governed order. So, for example, the opening may be 'Long ago' or 'One day' or 'Once' or any others out of a selection of ten choices within each phrase's data line. Then comes the definitive article, followed by an adjective and then the subject noun, a verb and finally a direct object. This structure varies as the program progresses.

The Storyline is a most interesting program with great possibilities at the junior school and remedial levels.