Re: the Random Place Name Generator.
My memory was at fault - this was not on paper and I have been reminded that it was an early essay by my wife into computer programming in 1980 using our first computer - a Tandy TRS80 with 16K RAM (no, I have not made a mistake!), no programs, storage on cassette tape and a dot matrix printer.
The generator was based on the fact that many one-word names can be split into two parts. The first part might be the name of a crop, plant or tree: alder, ash, ban, bar; the second of some geographical feature: ford, hill, ham - giving the place names Alderford, Ashill, Banham, Barford. The 'roots' go back many hundreds of years, to Celtic, Roman or Saxon times, and can be difficult to interpret. This does not matter - Ban and Bar can still be used without knowing that they derive from bean and barley.
Two lists were built up from a book giving over 600 place names in Norfolk, England. The computer program then randomly selected one name from each list and combined them. If the combination had already been chosen, it was not repeated. From the examples above this could have given Alderhill, Ashford, Barhill, Banford etc. Some combinations seemed realistic, those that did not could be rejected - this is a dependent on the user's perception.
As a further stage, variety could be created by using prefixes such as Great, Little, West, North; or suffixes like Market, Thorpe, Magna, Parva. Another possibility is to remember that after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the new overlords added their family names to traditional place names, ending up with examples such as Ashill Melville, Banham Beaufort, etc. The possuibilities are almost endless.
A lot depends on the area in which one's fictitious place is depicted as certain areas of the UK have particular name elements. For instance,there are very few names in Norfolk which contain Celtic elements - aber, coombe, pen. However, there are some Roman elements - caster, Strat - and many Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian, as this is where those people settled.
It would have been possible to do the same thing uses sets of cards; and paradoxically in my opinion it was easier to do with a very simple computer in which everything had to be done in BASIC. Computer programming experts may disagree ...
Ray
