“Sid Meier’s Pirates!” was famously the first game to bare the name of its legendary creator. But it wasn’t the first time an author used his name in the title of a computer game. In 1982, a small adventure game developer called Screenplay published “Ken Uston’s Professional Blackjack,” named after its reputed author and the most famous blackjack player in the United States at the time. But who was Ken Uston? And why did Paul Schindler sing the praises of his blackjack program on an early “Computer Chronicles” episode? Find out in this episode of the Chronicles Revisited Podcast.

In one of his earliest software reviews for the “Random Access” segment of Computer Chronicles, Paul Schindler praised Ken Uston’s Professional Blackjack, noting that while “most computer games will just play blackjack with you,” this program “will teach you how to play the game and win using various point counting methods.” Schindler said it was also “pretty rare when the writer gets top billing when they name a computer program, but Uston deserves it.” Schindler explained Uston was a “former official of the Pacific Stock Exchange and now he’s a full-time gambler.”