What shall we do for our thousandth issue, people around here have been saying to each other for the past couple of months. We could run a load of tearouts of all our biggest exclusives since the first issue of Computergram appeared years ago with an exclusive full spec of the then about-to-be-unveiled IBM Personal Computer AT. But one way and another there are six or seven big exclusives a month in Computergram, (there aren’t? Who’s counting?) – reviewing the best is a bit tacky, and dammit, if people are paying whatever it says you have to pay at the bottom of this page for the thing, they have a right to expect the odd exclusive. What about re-running the pick of the tailpieces over the last four years? With 999 of the things, there must have been one or two that were really quite funny, but then somehow, the ones you recall as being the very best never look quite so good the second time around. We could always sell a load of ads from subscribers saying things like Congratulations on your first thousand issues from Ne’erdowell Computing or whatever and run a couple of pages of the things in the issue. Now that was a good idea, but unfortunately, no-one got around to selling the ads. Horrendous errors On the other hand we could run a colour picture in No 1,000 that would be something really new and it could be done – but one can never find a picture that quite seems worth the cost and effort when you want it. Then there is the other kind of superlative – the most horrendous errors that have appeared in Computergram, like the time we said the Apollo reservation system ran on Unisys hardware when it runs on IBM, or the one we picked up from Reuters that said IBM was going into the public telephone exchange business in Germany, or the issues that went out wrongly numbered or dated or the time we ran the same page in two – oh no, no, that stuff is just too painful. And anyway, one way and another, a thousand issues is not that much of a landmark for a daily – it’s not even quite four years, and you surely need to have five years behind you before you can start thinking that perhaps the thing really has arrived. Then again, we could always… No we couldn’t. We’ll just say thank you all out there for bearing with us this long, and here’s to the next thousand issues.
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