Beautiful Architecture

Folklore

Coming back into the present, early 21st century, it’s easy to forget the sheer fun of working with the computer. Tandem was a fun company, and it looked after its employees. One Friday in late 1974, early in the development of the system, the founders finally got the software to work on the hardware; up to this point the software had been developed on simulators. You can imagine the excitement. The story goes that one of the VPs went out and brought in a crate of beer, and they all sat around the crate, celebrating the event and discussing the future. One thing they decided was that the crate of beer should be a weekly event, and the Tandem Beer Bust was born. It really did continue into the 1990s, during which time it became increasingly politically incorrect and was finally canceled.

Tandem gave rise to lots of slogans and word plays, of course—the name “Tandem” itself was one. In those days we had T-shirts with slogans such as “So nice, so nice, we do it twice,” “There’s no stopping us,” and “Tandem users do it with mirrors.” And, of course, the standard answer when anybody came up with an excess of just about anything: “It’s there in case one fails.”

This last slogan was more than just wordplay. It sat deep in our thought processes. In May 1977, on returning from five weeks of initial Tandem training, I was faced with the sad discovery that our cat had run away. After establishing that she wasn’t going to return, we went out and got…two new cats. It wasn’t until much ...