In the July 24, 1969, Good Times, Richard gets his second Good Times byline, although it is the first time it is printed as “d. gaik.” Gaik’s article is about an astrology group in Berkeley and includes the information that some people are using computers to do astrology.

I wondered about this. Who was using computers to do astrology in 1969? What were the particulars of such an endeavor? Of course, there are many sections of this book that explore the possibility of getting on a mainframe at a Bay Area college. But what about the early days of standalone computers, what have become to be known as personal computers?

In the early 1970s, the personal computer industry was fledgling, guys in their garages or their parent’s garage. The entire idea of personal computers was scoffed at by many, who argued that a mainframe, or think “cloud” today, could always provide more computing power than an individual computer.

I learned that in 1977, the Digicomp DR-70 Astrology Minicomputer debuted, the first commercially available computer designed specifically to do astrology.

Digicomp Research was based in Ithaca, New York, started by some Cornell grad students. My interest sharpened on this. David Levine was from Ithaca, the son of a Cornell professor. In 1977, David Levine would have been of grad school age, a similar age to the people at Digicomp. David Levine was building his own computer at Stanford in 1973. It is a certainty that prototyping of the DR-70 had to occur in the years prior to 1977.

This would be a pretty wild conjecture, but was there a chance of overlap between David Levine and the creators of the DR-70? I decided to dig deeper.

When I googled the Digicomp DR-70 Astrology Minicomputer, I found picture of one. I did a double take and had a moment of recognition. The blue device with a black keyboard looked strangely familiar. You see, it didn’t look like a computer to me and my 1980s and 90s comprehension. I didn’t know what this random piece of old tech was, this keyboard sort of adding machine sort of blue metal… thing. But it jogged my memory. I think there was one of these in Richard’s apartment.

To me is just looked like a big, old, clunky adding machine, or some other old technology that I remember seeing, but Richard had things like that in his apartment. I mean, there are old pieces of tech in my house right now. Techies have such things, artists have stuff laying around. All I can say is the picture of the DR-70 looks strikingly similar to equipment I remember seeing at Richard’s place.

I ended up speaking with the owners of Digicomp, and found no connection to David Levine nor his father. It was just a coincidence that it was people from Cornell. They did mention to me that a DR-70 was used by Joan Quigley to calculate charts for her clients, including Nancy and Ronald Reagan.