{"id":17,"date":"2009-11-16T02:55:09","date_gmt":"2009-11-16T01:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brainstormsw.com\/thinkerlog\/?p=17"},"modified":"2009-11-16T02:55:09","modified_gmt":"2009-11-16T01:55:09","slug":"the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-author-douglas-adams-brainstorm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brainstormsw.com\/wordpress\/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-author-douglas-adams-brainstorm\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams & BrainStorm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Early 1980s<\/span><\/p>\n

Douglas Adams<\/strong><\/a>, writer, dramatist, musician and\u00a0author of\u00a0The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy<\/strong><\/a><\/em>,\u00a0faxed this letter to David Tebbutt, BrainStorm creator and founder. <\/span><\/p>\n

Douglas Adams remarks about BrainStorm…<\/p>\n

I\u2019m beginning to boggle at the scope of your programme. It\u2019s\u00a0quite extraordinary \u2013 and addictive.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…and making us wonder, if BrainStorm were available in the 70’s, would he have written\u00a0The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy<\/strong><\/em><\/a> in BrainStorm?<\/p>\n

To see the letter, go here\u00a0Douglas Adams Fax to BrainStorm<\/a> or read it in full below.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Here, as promised, is Brainstorm properly configured to use the Rainbow line-drawing graphics. If you SUBMIT BRAIN you will load the function key processor which works with it. You will probably find the key assignments I\u2019ve made seem strange to you. I\u2019m still experimenting, and trying to make the controls correspond as closely as I can to my word processing function keys. Changing key assignments is very easy and self explanatory. Simply type FK from the system prompt to get into the function key programme and make changes. Each key will take up to 128 characters. Come to think of it, the programme\u2019s documentation on disk so I\u2019ll add that on.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also included some information from the Rainbow technical manual and from a recent article which enable you to speed up the VDU display. It\u2019s pretty slow at the moment.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m beginning to boggle at the scope of your programme. It\u2019s quite extraordinary \u2013 and addictive.<\/p>\n

One or two questions.<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s BRUN.COM for? It gets mentioned in passing in the manual but never explained.<\/span><\/p>\n

Is there any way of deleting all occurrences of a namesake? I\u2019m sure there must be and I just haven\u2019t found it yet.<\/span><\/p>\n

Loading and saving are rather tedious chores at the moment. Three useful facilities to incorporate would be:<\/span><\/p>\n

1) <\/span><\/span><\/span>The ability to reset the default drive during INSALLB.<\/span><\/p>\n

2) <\/span><\/span><\/span>The ability to invoke the appropriate .BRN file at the same time you load the programme. For example: \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0>brain diary.brn<\/span><\/p>\n

3) <\/span><\/span><\/span>A quick save capability. So that everytime <\/span>you go and get a cup of coffee you can hit a couple of keys and update your disk whilst you\u2019re away. That way, REBRAIN becomes less necessary \u2013 prevention is better than cure.<\/span><\/p>\n

Will the 16-bit version allow you to use all your computer\u2019s available memory? And run other programmes outside BRAINSTORM? That way you would have just one huge personal database which you would simply stay in all day whatever work you were doing. The possibilities are endless.<\/p>\n

Anyway, congratulations on a brilliant idea. Hope it makes you a rich man.<\/span><\/p>\n

Best wishes,<\/span><\/p>\n

Douglas Adams”<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Douglas Adams, writer, dramatist, musician and author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, faxed this letter to David Tebbutt, BrainStorm creator and founder. <\/p>\n

One Douglas Adams remark about BrainStorm worth noting…<\/p>\n

“I\u2019m beginning to boggle at the scope of your programme. It\u2019s quite extraordinary \u2013 and addictive.”<\/p>\n

…and making us wonder, were it available in the 70’s, would he have written The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in BrainStorm?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[7,11,8,17,9,19,13,14,15,16,12,10,18,20],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brainstormsoftwarehistory","category-brainstormreviews","tag-brainstorm","tag-brainstorm-history","tag-brainstorming","tag-david-tebbutt","tag-douglas-adams","tag-famous-writers","tag-mindmapping","tag-mindmapping-software","tag-note-taking","tag-note-taking-software","tag-outlining-software","tag-the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy","tag-writing","tag-writing-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9me0d-h","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brainstormsw.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brainstormsw.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brainstormsw.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainstormsw.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainstormsw.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainstormsw.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brainstormsw.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainstormsw.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainstormsw.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}