Rasp Fantazia - What's in a name?

The name Rasp came from an abbreviation of "raspberry water", which was a soft drink substitute I whipped up on the moment while I was bouncing across Europe with Bethany.  We were on a budget plan that would put any of those public television travel shows to shame... basically, our budget per day was $0 to eat, $0 to travel, and $0 to sleep.  Very gypsyish.  Of course we spent more than that.. or we would of starved.  I think I actually did.  But anyway, that's the way to go, if you have no other, or, unless you want to be pegged as a fat American tourist.  Not that I didn't complain alot about the lack of creature comforts. 

By the way, the plane tickets were paied for with borrowed money.  Um, enough said.  ;-)  We had two backpacks, some extra cloths, and a small tent, that we carried around on our back.

Rasp came about when we were in an Austrian grocery store, and I picked up a bottle of raspberry syrup... thinking, it would make a good flavoring, I was getting tired of drinking just water.  We had a Coke bottle that we used (yes, over and over again), to keep water in... I'd take some of the cleanest mountain stream water I could find... add some syrup... and presto, the sweetest thing you ever tasted.  Grasp the rasp!  What a catchy slogan...    See below for a picture of Bethany and the stream and the first bottle of Rasp!

Anyway, when I got back to America I got all kinds of ambis`cious dreams that I would become the next Coca Cola and kick things off by giving away free samples.  I never put the drink in production, but then, the name stuck in my mind. 

I did some research on how the softdrink industry was founded and was reading something one time on the formula for Coke, and it said, that all these flavors of soft drinks that came out around the same turn of the century (such as coke) were dubbed 'fantasia flavors', in other words, they were mixtures that didn't mimic any flavor found from a natural fruit.  I liked the name fantasia, so it stuck with me and got pegged on the end of rasp...  except, I changed the 's' to a 'z'.  But the early logos you can see, I was still using the "s" in some of them.

And know you know... the rest of the story...
 

Welcome to my First Dream

Not to waste a great name like Rasp, I published several initial pieces of software under the evolving Rasp name, the most notable of which was Confederate Grey which was a huge project.   It was basically a risk type game, but it took a huge amount of work to make the custom GUI interface with the odd shape of states as buttons.  I held up a traced map of the United States on wax paper and clicked around each states borders in a connect the dot fashion with a custom written program to caputre the generated data. 

I wrote a few others like Deluxe Trivia Hangman, Merlin, Classic Artilery, and a lot of just playing around in code. 

While I was working at Ebasco (an engineering firm) and still only had the Mac SE, I decided to get serious and write a financial software package.   After a lot of blood sweat and tears I came out with MoneyTracker EaZy Ledger. 

MoneyTracker was notable, in that I would adopt the name MoneyTracker instead and abandon Rasp Fantazia as being too 'artsy creative'.  It was time after all to get down to business and make gobs of cash. 

And so, The MoneyTracker Corporation was born, and Rasp Fantazia's fate was sealed and relegated to the bit dustbin of time. 

You can see some of the early pictures on my old home page.
 
 

Rasp Fantazia Clipart

The purple and cyan banner you see is one of two I made to cover a table when I went to exhibit at software and computer shows.  The letters were printed out on a mac, and then somehow I glued them to the back of the cyan cloth with elmers glue perhaps (that would wash off and release when wet), and then I cut out the lets, and ironed them on with some iron on type glye sheet.  The edges of the banners were sewed. 

With my shrinkwrapped (which I also did with a hairdryer) software spread out on the table, with multicolored disks and manual covers that were full cover, it made quite a colorful display on a very low budget.
 
 

Bethany as water nymph, with the first and last picture of a bottle Rasp...  :-)  Somewhere in Austria.  The rocks were slippery and the stream water was clear and cold!