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My dad was a computing professional in Scotland in the 1970s. He received a couple of industry trade magazines every week, such as Computer Weekly and Computing. In one of them, I remember there being a cartoon strip called Computability Brown (a pun on Capability Brown, the 18th century landscape architect), but I've had no luck finding references to it.

What I remember:

  • It was drawn in the style of Frank Dickens's Bristow: small roundish men in suits working in an ironic office setting.

  • There was usually a mainframe printer in the background going “dump dump dump”. This might be a hint that the strip was drawn by Dickens, as he was famous for writing indicative words to express emotions rather than drawing expressions.

  • The time frame would have been likely between 1977 and 1984.

There doesn't seem to be good archives of either of these magazines, so I'm not finding anything to back up my memory.

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    Not an answer, but I don't recall any such thing, and I had subscriptions to those two rags in the late 1970s. Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 22:17
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    The title is so good that it ought to exist. Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 22:22
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    Either an obscure or extensive library "somewhere" might have copies of those magazines for that era that could be perused. Commented Jul 20, 2021 at 11:02
  • "Computability Brown" sounds to me like it could also be a variation on "Encyclopedia Brown" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Brown). Probably not, but it comes to mind. Commented Mar 19, 2022 at 14:59
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    'Encyclopedia Brown' was not generally known in the UK, though, whereas Capability Brown was a name known even to dedicated non-gardeners, such as myself. Commented Mar 19, 2022 at 15:31

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