Many eons ago, der Brucer and I wrote a computer astrology program.
The challenge came from my days with the gay softball leagues. The team that I was with had arranged for a booth at the Orange County Gay Pride Festival, and needed something to do as a fundraiser. One teammate suggested something to do with astrology, another suggested computer dating, and a third suggested putting the two ideas together... and looked at der B and myself as the people who should do all the work.
Keep #3 in mind for later.
Der Brucer found an astrology computer program that was pretty rickety, and was able to hack into it and get it running at a fairly decent speed. Meanwhile, I got some research going and was able to a) find a book that included the best matches for each astrological sign (that took care of the dating part on computer).
What we decided to try was a coding system: anyone who had the basic program run for them got a wristband made of yarn, which corresponded with their astrological sign. They also received a list that told them which other wristbands to look for. Believe it or not, this sold! People at the fair spent the entire day looking for their matching bands.
But that wasn't good enough for us, oh no. Der B, heading off on a business trip, asked me to dig up more data on each of the signs, and all of the rest of it, so that we could rewrite all the stuff re planetary aspects, houses, and such. We could then sell this stuff at a higher price. So I bought something like three or four books on the subject, compared the information, and wrote my own little blurbs for every planet placement, angle, and on and on.
When der B got back from his business trip, he plugged all the stuff I'd typed up into the program, and voila, we had our very own computer astrology program.
The only problem was, we had a very slow printer.
The solution was, der B bought new, second printer. He hooked up both the old printer and the new one to the computer; if anyone bought the big, full printout, we sent that to the new printer; the old printer was fast enough for the Astro-Match stuff (which is what we called the dating stuff).
The whole thing was a hit, enough that when the opportunity came up to re-present the thing at the next gay pride fest, in Long Beach the following spring, we did exactly that, where it was once again a success. Der B even got the program to run faster, so we didn't have the long waits for everything to print out. We did run into a glitch with the aforementioned #3, who claimed that the program was partly his, because it was "his idea." I've rarely had as much pleasure telling someone to pound sand as I did that time.
It's too bad that we didn't remember the old rule, never play the same game three times running. We tried the same thing later that year, at the West Hollywood Gay Pride Fest. Wrong audience entirely, far too jaded. The Saturday crowd was too easily bored, the Sunday post-parade crowd was only interested in getting beered up.
We put the program away, I got disinvolved with softball, and that was that. A year later, at the next WeHo Fest, three other entrepeneurs had their own programs running, in competition with each other and not in support of any groups needing fundraising (der B and I always did this as a charitable thing).
So der B and I instead got involved with politics for the next decade or so.
