Bruno B. Wolff Jr. and the Analytical Engine

In reference to:  
Sherlock Holmes and the Analytical Engine
Volume:  
4
Issue:  
8

When I posted "Sherlock and the Analytical Engine," a question came up on the author’s copyright. Unlike most of the content in Softalk, for fiction articles the copyright belonged to the author. If I wanted to showcase this story, I had to get permission to post this article from Bruno. To do that, I had to find him first. Thirty years is a long time.

Technology today is absolutely amazing! I did a search on “Bruno B. Wolff, Jr.,” and one of the very first Google entries was a newsletter from the Milwaukee Catholic Home with Bruno on the front page as the Volunteer of the Year in Spring 2011.

In a flash I searched for and found the Milwaukee Catholic Home on Facebook and sent a message to ask if their Bruno was our Bruno. He was. And, here’s the rest of the story from Bruno himself.

I published several other articles therein in those happy days, but unlike “Sherlock,” they were technical. Those articles, however, did lead a publisher to ask me to do a book on the Apple II, which was published about that time, Modular Programming Routines for the Apple II+/IIe/IIc. You can still pick up a copy on Amazon for about three times what it sold for in 1985.

I have three other Holmes stories that were never published though one book company looked at them with interest before saying no. These, however, antedated the computer and are in manuscript form only.

From the halcyon days of Softalk to his busy schedule today, Bruno has been true to his techie roots. To find out more about Bruno's journey from Softalk to 2014, the "Where Bruno Is Now" post will be forthcoming soon.

Like many of us, Bruno hung on to a nice collection of Softalk magazines. As time and luck would have it though, he lost his collection in a flood a few years back. I’m guessing he will enjoy reading through the scanned issues as they come on line here at the Softalk Apple Project.