X-Nico

Kitchen Table International

Several years after the company demonstrated its Reverse LPRINT command, which allowed a dot-matrix printer to function as a scanner (the demo was actually a videotape run backwards, showing sheets of text feeding into a printer and coming out blank after they’d been “scanned”), Thunderware introduced the Thunderscan scanner, which replaced the ribbon cartridge of an Apple ImageWriter with a scanning module.

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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.

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Although not as pointed as the classic The Devil’s DP Dictionary by Stan Kelly-Bootle, 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.

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