Tindallgrams – Jamie Todd Rubin

This is the story of Usenet, an obsession with astronauts, a deep dive into NASA history, a delightful discovery, forgetting that discovery for a quarter century, and my inability to successfully carry out a Google search.

This story begins in the 1990s, deep in the bowels of Usenet, which was social media in the days before social media. In the late 90s, I was very interested in NASA, and particularly, their astronaut candidate program. I thought, in my youthful innocence, that I would make a good astronaut candidate, or ass-can, for short. I followed astronaut candidate news groups assiduously. I also read news groups about NASA. It was around this time that I also began to take flying lessons¹ out of Van Nuys Airport north of Los Angeles with the idea that having a pilot's license would help in my pursuit of becoming an astronaut².

Somewhere between newsgroups on astronaut candidates and deep dives into NASA history, I came across Bill Tindall, and Tindallgrams. Tindall was the architect of the methods used to get Apollo to the lunar surface and he was famous within NASA for writing hundreds of memos that came to be known as Tindallgrams. This was in the mid-1960s-1970, well before email. I remember reading through some of those memos, enjoying the tone and appreciating the succinctness of his writing style. I tried to model some of my emails at the time on Tindallgrams.

I may as well tell you now that I never became an astronaut, although I did become a private pilot. It turned out that astronaut candidates tended toward highest of high achievers. It seemed to me, reading through dozens of bios of applicants who eventually made it into the program that the “typical” profile of an astronaut was someone with a few thousand hours of aircraft piloting experience on a variety of aircraft, often jet aircraft. In addition, they had a Ph.D. in some area of astronomy or physics or chemistry, and frequently, had an M.D. as well. Occasionally, they'd add in a Masters in Art History to round things off. In their copious free time, they were expert rock-climbers, or competitive surfers. Oh, and they were married and had several kids.

Now, this was all happening during the Dot Com bubble of the late 1990s. While I did not work for a Dot Com, I worked in I.T. and one could not work in I.T. during this time without seeing the effects of the Dot Com bubble. I read lots of Usenet groups on tech and technology. I read groups on Linux, which at the time seemed to me like the techie version of a model train set. I read various Unix and Windows newsgroups. And, of course, I read and participated in rec.arts.sf.written. It is important to know this because it plays a role in the confusion that happens later.

Later, being twenty-five years later, or 2024. Roughly a year ago. At some point, and for some reason, I remembered those interesting memos that I'd read a quarter century earlier and I went to look for them. The problem was I couldn't remember the name. All I could remember was that they were something-something-grams. My memory of the time conflated NASA and tech and my Google searches were all for things like “-grams famous tech memos” and similar queries. I knew that if I saw the name, I'd recognize it immediately. I never found the match I was looking for, even though every few months, I'd try, try again.

This morning, thinking about this once again, I posted the question to an internal board at my company. I figured since there are a lot of very smart people where I work, one of them would recognize what I was talking about. The initial responses were filled with names that did not match what I thought I remembered. There was a near-miss. The name Steven Sinofsky came up and my heart skipped a beat. That name was familiar. I do remember reading Sinofsky's blog during his time at Microsoft. But I was fairly certain that what I was looking for had two syllables: blah-blah-grams. Sinofsky has three syllables, and Sinofsky-grams didn't sound right to me.

I decided to give the search one more try. I typed the following into Google:

“-gram” famous tech memos

Now, those of you looking at this will see at once the problem, and as a career programmer, I should have recognized this a year ago, but it wasn't until this morning that I saw the flaw in my search. I was trying to isolate the “-gram” part of the search so that I got matches that were like “blah-gram” or “foo-gram”. Google was treating my “-gram” as “exclude anything with the term “gram.” Which, of course, was fatal. I would never find what I was looking for. Duh!

I modified the search slightly to:

“gram” famous tech memos

And guess what? One of the first matches had the word “Tindallgram” in it, and as soon as I saw it, I knew that was what I was looking for. What a relief! I'd completely forgotten the source of these memos was not a tech guru in the Dot Com bubble, but an engineer at NASA. It didn't help that my search included the phrase “tech” in that regard.

Well, I found the Tindallgrams, at last. I downloaded the PDF versions of them so that I have them whenever I want to glance through them. Along the way, I also discovered a book about the Apollo program I hadn't already read (I sometimes feel like I've read them all). This is Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir by Don Eyles who programmed the landing phase of Apollo into the Lunar Module's computer.

And I lived happily ever after, surrounded by stacks of Tindallgrams and an exciting new book on arcane NASA history.

The End.