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My dad was a computing professional in Scotland in the 1970s. He received a couple of industry trade magazines every week, such as Computer Weekly and Computing. In one of them, I remember there being a cartoon strip called Computability Brown (a pun on Capability Brown, the 18th century landscape architect), but I've had no luck finding references to it.

What I remember:

  • It was drawn in the style of Frank Dickens's Bristow: small roundish men in suits working in an ironic office setting.

  • There was usually a mainframe printer in the background going “dump dump dump”. This might be a hint that the strip was drawn by Dickens, as he was famous for writing indicative words to express emotions rather than drawing expressions.

  • The time frame would have been likely between 1977 and 1984.

There doesn't seem to be good archives of either of these magazines, so I'm not finding anything to back up my memory.

scruss
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    Not an answer, but I don't recall any such thing, and I had subscriptions to those two rags in the late 1970s. – dave Jul 19 '21 at 22:17
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    The title is so good that it ought to exist. – dave Jul 19 '21 at 22:22
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    Either an obscure or extensive library "somewhere" might have copies of those magazines for that era that could be perused. – Fred Jul 20 '21 at 11:02
  • "Computability Brown" sounds to me like it could also be a variation on "Encyclopedia Brown" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Brown). Probably not, but it comes to mind. – Wayne Conrad Mar 19 '22 at 14:59
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    'Encyclopedia Brown' was not generally known in the UK, though, whereas Capability Brown was a name known even to dedicated non-gardeners, such as myself. – dave Mar 19 '22 at 15:31
  • @Fred if something is published in the United Kingdom or Ireland then by law 5 copies go to one of the 'legal deposit' libraries, of which there 5 in the UK and one in Ireland. So it'll be there somewhere! – Alan B Aug 16 '22 at 07:57
  • There was one called "The Hackers" in Popular Computing Weekly that roughly has the style you describe. – JeremyP Apr 13 '23 at 09:29
  • https://www.wussu.com/hackers/ – JeremyP Apr 13 '23 at 09:31
  • @JeremyP - I remember that, but it wasn't it. It was a subscription trade magazine, not one you could buy in a newsagent – scruss Apr 13 '23 at 13:51
  • @JeremyP - I wouldn't call that similar to Frank Dickens's style either, though it's possible the OP could have been misremembering. – dave Apr 13 '23 at 21:19
  • @another-dave - it definitely wasn't Hackers, which was in the wrong publication and about five years later – scruss Apr 13 '23 at 21:47
  • I was briefly thrilled by getting a hit from a web search: M. Herlihy and N. Shavit / The Topological Structure of Asynchronous Computability / Brown Technical Report. Alas, no. (Newlines in original replaced by slash in this comment). – dave Apr 14 '23 at 01:09
  • @another-dave When I Google it, the top hit always looks promising, but it's this page. – JeremyP Apr 14 '23 at 08:03

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