I was going through boxes in the garage the other day, looking for things to fill the bookcases I recently assembled, when I came across the October 1979 issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia. The magazine is now known as “Dr. Dobb’s,” but things back then were a little looser, with many companies having fanciful names – among the others I recall are Pickles & Trout, Parasitic Engineering, and Brown Dog Engineering, and Infoworld was once known as the Silicon Gulch Gazette. I used to work for a word processor company called NBI. Management claimed that it stood for “Nothing But Initials,” but I’ve seen one of the company’s original business cards, and its original name was Necton Bylennium, Inc. As an aside, I read about a man in California who was starting a computer consultancy back in the early 1980s who had trouble coming up with a business name that contained “computer” or “data” that wasn’t already being used, so he ended up naming his business “Solfan Industries,” with “Solfan” being an initialism for “Sick Of Looking For A Name.”
In any case, that issue of DDJ contains an article which is almost my sole publication to date in the computer field, apart from a letter to the editor in an old Apple II user group publication, a program distributed by the same user group, and a caption in one of the E.E. Times‘ Immortal Works competitions. Not a lot of output for thirty years, is it? Ah, well, something is better than nothing, and it’s not as though I haven’t been doing other things in the meantime.
