(FORTUNE Magazine) – Curious, is it not, how those personal computer magazines are chockablock with ads for tax programs at this time of year, as though you need a diskette to communicate with the revenuers, and meanwhile nobody except the good old Keeping Up Software Department is offering the seasonal assistance that folks out there really crave, according to survey data rated reliable within 18 percentage points at the 60% confidence level. We here allude to Compusit, the niche-filling dinner-party seating program, and if our production team does not screw up, many a hostess will relievedly clutch this software to her bosom as she looks to the challenges of the spring social season. Version 1 of Compusit is written in Basic and posits a standard 12-person dinner party. As is well known, there are 39,916,800 possible ways of arranging 12 people around a table, and our software would be more than delighted to show you every one. But, of course, the tribal customs of the American bourgeoisie do not allow for most of these arrangements, and are in fact inflexible with respect to two taboos: you cannot sit next to your spouse or date, and adjacency to parties of identical gender is likewise interdicted in and out of Winnetka. These restrictions reduce the number of legal possibilities by 99.98% and yet leave our hostess obliged to choose among 9,600 seating combinations, a number that could cause gridlock in the neurons if the lady is conscientious. But, you are worriedly asking, how user-friendly is Compusit and does it come with a demo? Not to worry. Not only is there a demonstration diskette but it will instantly place before your awestruck orbs an haute monde dinner party requiring decisions aplenty before anybody can sit down and eat. At the table will be Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Sean Penn and Madonna, Ed Koch and Bess Myerson, Mort Zuckerman and Gloria Steinem, William (the Refrigerator) Perry and Mrs. Refrigerator, and the John Zaccaro-Geraldine Ferraro twosome. How to seat them? The program begins by democratically assuming that it is okay for most of the men to sit next to most of the women. However, the program also assumes that some legal matchups will be rated especially desirable and some especially undesirable. So when you load Compusit into memory, it begins by friendlily prompting you for these good and evil combinations. Let's say, for example, that you want Henry Kissinger to sit next to Gloria Steinem, as she might help him to understand the New York psyche if he changes his mind and runs for governor. You might also want Geraldine Ferraro to sit next to Mort Zuckerman, since it is time she learned something about real estate. On the other hand, you would definitely not want the Refrigerator next to Madonna, for they could start arguing about who got more media hype in the fourth quarter. Under Compusit's scoring system, you get a zero for an undesirable matchup, five for an okay matchup, and ten for one rated desirable. Now we come to the exciting part. Using the random-number generator in Basic, you run the program and watch it display various combinations for your delectation. For a 12-person dinner party, a par score is 60, and the object is to find a seating arrangement as far above that as possible. (The highest possible total, assuming you identify only two desirable matchups, would be 70.) Compusit will be sold exclusively in supermarkets, and if it doesn't move we may try a Version 1A that also does your taxes.