Kitchen Table International was a fictitious computer company created as a faux amalgam of

Radio Shack RadioShack (formerly written as Radio Shack) is an American electronics retailer that was established in 1921 as an amateur radio mail-order business. Its parent company was purchased by Tandy Corporation in 1962, which shifted its focus from ma ...

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Comput ...

Commodore Business Machines Commodore International Corporation was a home computer and electronics manufacturer with its head office in The Bahamas and its executive office in the United States founded in 1976 by Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould. It was the successor comp ...

, and other organizations of the time, and was the subject of one of the earliest regular computer humor columns, appearing in Wayne Green's

80 Micro ''80 Micro'' was a computer magazine, published between 1980 and 1988, that featured program listings, products and reviews for the TRS-80. History Wayne Green, the creator of many magazines such as ''73 (magazine), 73'', founded ''80 Microcom ...

magazine
from January 1981 through July, 1983. It was invented by computer journalist David D. Busch, and billed as the "world's leading supplier of fictitious hardware, software, firmware, and limpware". Each month a new "innovation" was introduced that poked fun at the infant personal computer industry. These included a "black phosphor"

computer monitor A computer monitor is an output device that displays information in pictorial or textual form. A discrete monitor comprises a electronic visual display, visual display, support electronics, power supply, Housing (engineering), housing, electri ...

, and a

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

with all the worst features of

BASIC Basic or BASIC may refer to: Science and technology * BASIC, a computer programming language * Basic (chemistry), having the properties of a base * Basic access authentication, in HTTP Entertainment * Basic (film), ''Basic'' (film), a 2003 film ...

and

COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural, and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily ...

, called BASBOL. The fictional company's flagship product was the TLS-8E, a computer which was sold with a factory-applied coating of oxidation on its peripheral edge card connectors ("to protect them from electricity"), a 5-inch "sloppy"

disk drive Disc or disk may refer to: * Disk (mathematics), a two dimensional shape, the interior of a circle * Disk storage * Optical disc * Floppy disk Music * Disc (band), an American experimental music band * ''Disk'' (album), a 1995 EP by Moby Other ...

, and a keyboard that eschewed the familiar

QWERTY QWERTY ( ) is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six Computer keyboard keys#Types, keys on the top letter row of the keyboard: . The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the Sh ...

array for a 16-key matrix that included a TBA (To Be Announced) key. According to Busch, the operation was founded by one "Scott Nolan Hollerith" (after Adventure programmer Scott Adams, Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, and computer pioneer Herman Hollerith). S.N. Hollerith, it was said, graduated from the University of California at Phoenix in 1970 with a degree in Slide Rule Design, and quickly built KTI into a multi-thousand-dollar empire on a foundation of selling maintenance upgrades for DROSS-DOS 8E, a microcomputer operating system that was a subset of CP/M. In 1981, KTI introduced the world's "first" 32-bit microprocessor, created by piggy-backing two 16-bit chips on top of each other, until it was discovered that, at best, only one of the two chips actually functioned at any given time and, at worst, they spent a lot of time fighting over whose turn it was. The KTI staff gradually phased Hollerith out of active participation by relocating to a new, high-tech facility in Cupertino, California, and not telling him where it was. Many of the phony products "introduced" by Kitchen Table International were actually introduced later. Several years after the company demonstrated its Reverse LPRINT command, which allowed a

dot-matrix printer Dot matrix printing, sometimes called impact matrix printing, is a computer printing process in which ink is applied to a surface using a relatively low-resolution dot matrix for layout. Dot matrix printers are a type of impact printer that p ...

to function as a scanner (the demo was actually a

videotape Videotape is magnetic tape used for storing video and usually Sound recording and reproduction, sound in addition. Information stored can be in the form of either an analog signal, analog or Digital signal (signal processing), digital signal. V ...

run backwards, showing sheets of text feeding into a printer and coming out blank after they had been "scanned"), Thunderware introduced the Thunderscan scanner, which replaced the ribbon cartridge of an Apple

ImageWriter The ImageWriter is a product line of dot matrix printers formerly manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc., and designed then to be compatible with their entire line of computers. There were three different models introduced over time, which wer ...

with a scanning module.

''Sorry About The Explosion!''

The Kitchen Table columns won the only Best Fiction Book award from the Computer Press Association for Busch in 1985, when he collected, revised, and edited the existing columns and some new material into a book, ''Sorry About The Explosion!'' published by

Prentice-Hall Prentice Hall was a major American educational publisher. It published print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market. It was an independent company throughout the bulk of the twentieth century. In its last few years it ...

. Never a best-seller, it achieved cult status largely from the popularity of the monthly KTI columns. The title of the book came from the subject line of a "memo" in the book from KTI R & D director Otto Wirk to company president Scott Nolan Hollerith sheepishly explaining that the organization's latest product had an MTBE (Mean Time Between Explosions) of only 100 hours. Although not as pointed as the classic The Devil's DP Dictionary by

Stan Kelly-Bootle Stanley Bootle, known as Stan Kelly-Bootle (15 September 1929 – 16 April 2014), was a British author, academic, singer-songwriter and computer scientist. He took his stage name Stan Kelly (he was not known as Stan Kelly-Bootle in folk music cir ...

, the book, and the Kitchen Table International columns it was largely based upon, poked fun at the foibles of companies like Apple Computer, Radio Shack, Commodore, and Atari in an era when the early computer magazines were filled with technical articles, code listings, and discussions of the latest and greatest hardware, and not much regular humor. When the KTI column ceased publication in July, 1983, Busch collected all the existing material, reorganized it by topic, and wrote new pieces to produce ''Sorry About The Explosion!''.

References

External links

*{{cite web , last = Mello, Jr. , first = John P. , title = Article: Dateline Sri Lanka , publisher=80 Micro Magazine , date=April 1982 , url=http://www.dbusch.com/bio01.html , accessdate = 2006-09-19 Fictional companies Computer humour