by Jason Snell
‘Welcome datacomp’
I stumbled on this post via Bluesky, in which Jason Hazeley was utterly baffled by this section of a printed book:
The movement takes the place of a scherzo and is mainly constructed [of] the welcome datacompordinary major scale with the four lower notes shifted a semitone upward.
In the photo of the book passage, (presumably) Hazeley’s finger is pointing at the phrase “welcome datacompordinary major scale.” He wrote, “Absolutely stumped. Have never seen this term, can find no definition anywhere, and can’t parse it.”
Fortunately, Jacob Haller saw the post and pointed out that he wrote about it back in 2004:
Some Mac third party keyboards used to (or maybe still do for all I know) have a little feature where if you didn’t type anything for a while they would themselves type ‘welcome datacomp’. Here’s a nice little rant by someone who got caught by this.
That linked post is from 1994. In it, Chris Tate describes being baffled by a third-party ADB (the predecessor to USB) keyboard:
This past weekend, while trying to get some text-editing work done, I had to leave the computer alone for a while. Upon returning, I found to my horror that the text “welcome datacomp” had been inserted into the text I was editing. I was certain that I hadn’t typed it, and my wife verified that she hadn’t, either. A quick survey showed that the “clipboard” (the repository for information being manipulated via cut/paste operations) wasn’t the source of the offending text.
That story includes a cameo from John Norstad, the creator of the definitive free Mac antivirus app, who had apparently been contacted by numerous people assuming it was a virus:
Yes, we have heard of this. It’s a practical joke in the ROM code in some third-party keyboards. The only solution is to get your bad keyboard replaced.
My guess is that this wasn’t a practical joke as much as some sort of firmware test gone awry, but regardless, “welcome datacomp” managed to appear in numerous publications, as Haller’s post details. Someone finding it in a printed book in 2026 just shows you how the weird tech quirks of the past can just keep echoing long after they’ve gone.