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Comment by Ajay-p | Hacker News Reader

I am struggling to believe all of this. It feels like a calendar that was used but then someone later filed it in with all of this artwork, and commentary after the fact. Recording events that already happened. If this was a desk calendar, someone would have noticed, and noticed the content.

If it's true, it's a glimpse into the past and thinking of someone in a very important position during a very difficult time in the world.

But I can't quell this nagging doubt

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Ten minutes of viewing the “bullet journal” subreddit should convince you that, oh yes, it is probably very real. There’s an entire industry for this kind of stuff: highlighters, rubber stamps, fancy tape…

THANK YOU,

I've been trying to find this concept for the past 2 or three years.

I remember seeing this years and years ago and it was interesting.

I'm happy to hear that my random, off-hand comment was helpful to someone. :-)

About the drawing: i draw like this on everything too. Agendas, todo lists. Its not like i want to do this. Its to keep my fingers busy. I can attest that some people’s paper is filled with drawings ugly and nice. I cant speak about the authenticity of this document.

Yeah the drawing thing is a compulsion. It’s hard for others to understand but that’s okay. I used to draw all the time but now I miss it.

I used to be compulsive about making things. Way back when they still issued business cards I had to make geometric constructions with them.

You really think someone's gonna go back and do this for nine years of calendars? Look up something that happened every day to see if there's anything to make a doodle about?

Imagine: It is 1981. You are working deep inside a bureaucracy. Social media does not exist, there is no equivalent to checking Hacker News for "a few minutes" and blowing an entire hour on it. Usenet barely exists - it was established last year. You might not even have a computer on your desk. You certainly can't take out your smartphone and scroll through TikTok to kill some time seeing what the algorithm has for you today.

What you do have is this big desk calendar and a bunch of markers. Sometimes when something notable happens, you make a little doodle about it. Sometimes you start to get elaborate, but it's hard to blow more than a few minutes when you have a square that's only about an inch and a half across, and your markers are kinda blunt. It's a way to amuse yourself in a job that's pretty boring sometimes. Over time it becomes a habit.

Nobody's gonna see it. It's on your desk. It's under all the books and papers you're using to do your job. And it's right there whenever you need to take a break from thinking about whatever you're supposed to be doing. Hell, some of it might even be job-related - this person was an "analyst" and if they were analyzing world events then taking notes in here might have served as a nice little adjunct to their memory.

For a modern version, type "bullet journal" into an image search sometime, and be amazed at how complicated people can get with making doodles next to their daily planning. There's more to life than just dryly cranking out whatever you're obligated to do.

You almost certainly didn't have a computer on your desk in 1981. The IBM PC was released in August.

You might well have had a terminal on your desk, because that had been an increasingly common thing for over a decade by 1981. But probably nothing fun on it in a government/military setting.

My dad had a computer on his desk in 1979. It was a Z80 based business computer with a monochrome monitor, 5.25" floppy drive, and a dot matrix printer.

It wasn't cheap, but still not a huge investment for a small company.

The person with the calendar seems to have worked at a large defense related operation?

It wouldn't have been a financial stretch for them to have VT-100 terminals on their desks connected to VAX 11/780 superminicomputers as early as 1978.

> someone would have noticed, and noticed the content

And you are assuming the calendar owner would care. Why exactly?

And yeah, it would be filled both before the facts as a reminder and after the facts as something to take the mind away from some incredibly boring meeting. I can easily imagine somebody doing this.

The retrospective nature of knowing every important event and saying oh today was X seems improbable at best

They're military, so these "important events" would have been daily topical reports and were, at the time, already world news. There's also no reason to believe they'd only give themselves permission to write in each square during the 24 hour period of the corresponding day.

If Fridays are slow, catch up on the news, ink the notes you penciled in, and find some time to color them when you can. You've got the entire month - and that's a ton of time when you're not someone's productivity slave.

Also, notice the last week or two of each month gets sparser and less complete. That implies to me that they flipped the sheets and didn't go back to work on the old ones. If this were an art project, there wouldn't be a difference between the start and the end of the month.

I concur on its authenticity. It looks like someone's craft project using an old calendar.

Nicely done, though, however it originated: I wish I could letter and doodle so neatly.

I started working in offices around 1998 as an intern. The place I worked used email heavily, but had no shared calendar. Definitely people who did stuff like this. My boss had a bound dated diary book that he used to record what happened (vs where he had to be) decorated which he decorated with interesting doodles, etc.

We lost something with Outlook for everything.

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