Glenn wrote a week ago:

> Wirt writes:
>
>  > I used to write articles for "Creative Computing," one of the very
>  > first PC user magazines
>
>  Drat.  Neither the Jan-Feb/1997 nor the Sept-Oct/1978 issues I kept
>  has one of these articles. :(

Surprisingly, neither did I keep any of the articles from those days.
Apparently I wasn't nearly as nostalgic for those times now as I am now :-).
Because of that, I was going to let this thread disappear, but for completely
unrelated reasons, just yesterday I stumbled onto a web site in The
Netherlands where a fellow put up one of my old articles (although this one
is from Byte). I was about as surprised as anyone to find this site.

The article, although undated on the web page, was published sometime in the
summer or fall of 1976. I presume he got it from one of the "Best of Byte"
books. The article was republished several times (in furtherance of that
hypothesis, one of the figures has a page number of 231, and Byte didn't have
anywhere near that number of pages in 1976).

I was teaching college engineering at the time and I used to draw little
robots for the kids on the lab assignments. Because we were using Altairs in
the classes, the robots were always powered with Altairs mounted on their
bases. I did the same for the Byte magazine article, as you can see in the
URL:

     http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/davies/mvaicyb.html

Because the Byte article was about a speech synthesizer that we designed for
the Altair, the three robots in the opening figure were drawn to be
reminiscent of the three monkeys who heard no evil, saw no evil, and spoke no
evil.

The sole remaining remnant I have of one of the Creative Computing articles
is a similar figure I drew for one of the articles that was returned to me
just a few years ago. Our printing company found it in their files, where it
had been for 20 years!

I scanned it in this evening and put it up at:

     http://aics-research.com/cc1977.html

The same robot series appear in this figure, too. The article in Creative
Computing appeared in early 1977, shortly after the Viking landings on Mars
in 1976, and was also about speech synthesis and the Altairs (To understand
the joke that the figure represents, it's important to remember that the
primary mission of the Viking Landers was to look for life on Mars, a fact
that everyone was well aware of then).

Wirt Atmar