Throughout the day, attendees had opportunities to discuss digital initiatives at their organizations, to catch up informally after a long hiatus, and to browse the exhibitions on display at the National Museum of the American Indian. We’re so grateful to all of our Community Webs members who were able to attend the event and especially to those who shared their knowledge. Our next Community Webs Symposium will be held in Chattanooga this September 13 to coincide with the Association for Rural and Small Libraries Conference. We are looking forward to seeing more program members there!
Guest post by Kay Savetz, professional web publisher and amateur Atari historian
For years I hunted for the answer to the question: who wrote the adverting tagline “Have you played Atari today?” Atari started using it in print advertisements on April 1, 1982. Soon after, the words were phone number database sung in a jingle in many Atari TV commercials. As an Atari historian, the question plagued me: who wrote those words?
The first newspaper advertisement featuring the famous phrase: April 1st, 1982.
My computer historian colleagues didn’t know. I asked Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari. He thought it might have come from their ad agency at the time, Doyle Dane Bernbach. But when both a colleague and I separately reached out to DDB, we hit dead ends. I searched Internet Archive, commercial newspaper archives, and library collections, all in vain.
In 2021 I created a script called TIARA — The Internet Archive Research Assistant — which searches Internet Archive every day for newly uploaded items that match my selected words and phrases. (You can get the script free from ). It diligently searched for “Have you played Atari today?” daily, with no hint to the answer to my question.