NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

Everyone who has ever owned a computer has a "my first computer" story. Whether your earliest experiences with the "ones and zeros" was a Commodore 64 that loaded programs from a cassette player or you just finally got wired and broke your computer's slide-out "cup holder," everyone has a tale to tell.

The first computer I ever owned was a Packard Bell with a then-powerful 386 processor and Windows 3.1. I splurged and paid extra for a couple of upgrades: I went for the ginormous 100MB hard drive (up from 25; "you'll never fill this sucker up," said the salesman) and doubled the RAM to a scintillating 8MB. That thing probably wouldn't even launch XP's Notepad application, but man was it fast for its time, which was the very early 1990s.

NHRA has its "first computer" story, too, one that was presented to me in living color the other day in the form of a CD sent to me by the notorious "Beserko Bob" Doerrer, he of "Jungle Jim" and "Burnin' Bob" PR fame. The CD was full of scans from the April 1984 issue of Soft Talk, a magazine "by Apple owners for Apple owners" to which "Double-B" says you got a free two-year subscription when you bought an Apple computer. Soft Talk published an article on NHRA and its daring plunge into the computer age to manage its racing operations ("It's a drag! Apples in the National Hot Rod Association").

My old pal, former NHRA National Tech Director Bill "Farmer" Dismuke, who passed away about three years ago (and who used to let me play 1987's primitive but awesome Top Fuel Eliminator video game on his bitchin' green-screened Apple II during lunch or when he wasn't recalculating weight breaks and such), was interviewed about NHRA's move into the digital age in an article that spanned a whopping seven pages with lots of cool facts and Leslie Lovett photos.

Check out the cool lead photo image and see if you recognize a few of the folks. From left, it's John Muldowney, son of Top Fuel legend Shirley Muldowney, outside whose shop this photo was taken; Dickie Venables, whom you all know and love as the crew chief of Tony Pedregon's Q Horsepower Chevy but who cut his tuning teeth with Shirley in those glory days; Joe Sherk, who today has a pretty good PR racket going with clients such as Dave Connolly, Cory McClenathan, J.R. Todd, and others but back then was NHRA's publicity director; "Farmer" (whom the article described as possessing "a country manner reminiscent of Andy Griffith"; they obviously never saw him on the phone with an angry Pro Stock racer); and the other members of the headquarters Tech Department, the late Dave Danish and their assistant, Theresa Clark.

Anyway, the article that began unpromisingly ("Several thousand scantily-clad people sitting and standing in bleachers, tall cool ones in their hands…") turned out to be quite interesting, and, given the view through the kaleidoscope of history, quite humorous. Dismuke first got NHRA to open its purse strings for a computer back in 1978, and he taught himself how to use it. He first tracked points and event-worker availability. By 1980, an Apple computer in the timing tower was calling up driver information for the announcers, doing away with the age-old index-card system. Unfortunately, the less powerful systems of the day couldn’t handle the large number of entrants in classes such as Stock.

"The only thing that would have made it work at that time was a hard disk," said Dismuke. "We could have put the whole system in operation for less than $10,000."

Ten grand? That must have been some hard drive.

Now, I consider myself quite the power user -- well versed in most software and capable of maintaining and updating components inside my personal home computers -- but at a time when e.t.s were still read over a phone to the workers in the time-slip booth, Dismuke even envisioned what is today the concept for all modern timing systems, a split screen with information on each lane, with the information then transmitted to the finish line to be printed for each contestant.

The article even includes mention of your favorite racing weekly. "The NHRA also publishes a weekly newspaper, the National Dragster. The push for modernization has carried into the editorial offices of the Dragster, despite reluctance on the part of some of the writers." You know that wasn't me.

We did eventually get computers in the editorial office, but they weren't Macs. At least not at first. After using some no-frills dedicated word processors, eventually we did get some real Mac notebooks, and DRAGSTER really, really entered the computer age in 1988 when we brought design in-house and converted from a loose-leaf-type publication to a stapled tabloid. The first issue produced as such was the World Finals Sportsman coverage late in that year, and we've never looked back.

Those old Mac IIs and Power Macs have given way to powerful G5s throughout the Production Department (the editorial staff is PC-based) that allow cutting-edge graphics work such as this week's cover, which I promised to you yesterday. The cover blurb, "Welcome to the Club" refers to the eight first-time Indy winners we had this year as Brandon Wilkinson and Jason Coan were joined by Mike Ashley, Dave Connolly, Craig Treble, Marty Thacker, Pat Fitzpatrick, and Andrew Thomas. It's a pretty unique club: Just 329 racers, from Johnny Abbott to Lee Zane, can call themselves U.S. Nationals champs.