[egypturnash]

You really think someone's gonna go back and do this for nine years of calendars? Look up something that happened every day to see if there's anything to make a doodle about?

Imagine: It is 1981. You are working deep inside a bureaucracy. Social media does not exist, there is no equivalent to checking Hacker News for "a few minutes" and blowing an entire hour on it. Usenet barely exists - it was established last year. You might not even have a computer on your desk. You certainly can't take out your smartphone and scroll through TikTok to kill some time seeing what the algorithm has for you today.

What you do have is this big desk calendar and a bunch of markers. Sometimes when something notable happens, you make a little doodle about it. Sometimes you start to get elaborate, but it's hard to blow more than a few minutes when you have a square that's only about an inch and a half across, and your markers are kinda blunt. It's a way to amuse yourself in a job that's pretty boring sometimes. Over time it becomes a habit.

Nobody's gonna see it. It's on your desk. It's under all the books and papers you're using to do your job. And it's right there whenever you need to take a break from thinking about whatever you're supposed to be doing. Hell, some of it might even be job-related - this person was an "analyst" and if they were analyzing world events then taking notes in here might have served as a nice little adjunct to their memory.

For a modern version, type "bullet journal" into an image search sometime, and be amazed at how complicated people can get with making doodles next to their daily planning. There's more to life than just dryly cranking out whatever you're obligated to do.

[masfuerte]

You almost certainly didn't have a computer on your desk in 1981. The IBM PC was released in August.

[theodric]

You might well have had a terminal on your desk, because that had been an increasingly common thing for over a decade by 1981. But probably nothing fun on it in a government/military setting.

[fl7305]

My dad had a computer on his desk in 1979. It was a Z80 based business computer with a monochrome monitor, 5.25" floppy drive, and a dot matrix printer.

It wasn't cheap, but still not a huge investment for a small company.

The person with the calendar seems to have worked at a large defense related operation?

It wouldn't have been a financial stretch for them to have VT-100 terminals on their desks connected to VAX 11/780 superminicomputers as early as 1978.