Business card, as a blast from the past

I’ve been tidying up some of my old technical books recently to try and get them recycled (Undocumented DOS, anyone? No, I thought not.) In one of them, imagine my surprise to find one of my old business cards.

30 years ago, I formed a software company, called rather unimaginatively – at least from this viewpoint – Bucknall Software Ltd. I’d just got out of a rather nasty permanent position (long story) and was going to start doing some contracting, especially with regard to programming financial swaps and options. I had also, because at that time traders were using Lotus 1-2-3 for their spreadsheet work (remember that?), designed and written a Turbo Pascal code library that would read and write Lotus 1-2-3 files. I was set for the big time!

So, I had a chat with a friend who was this rather brilliant graphics designer (hi, Nick!) firstly about designing the manual for this library (yes, kids, in those days the documentation for a coding library was printed in a book. Imagine that!) and secondly about designing a business card for this new company.

And here it is!

Would you do business
with this bloke?

Yeah, so long ago, it was an “01” phone number for London! Nick did a fantastic job on the logo in my view: by using a German ß character to start with, we get the look-n-feel of a B and an S for Bucknall Software, and then by adding that little stroke jutting out to the left he hints at a J, for Julian. And then he makes it vertical, unlike everyone else's which were in landscape orientation. Absolutely bloody brilliant.

Unfortunately my initial contract fell through when the Australian financial company I was working for closed down, and the cost of producing a software library was way too prohibitive, so I went and found another permanent position. Bucknall Software was closed down and is no more.

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