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The History Is In The Shirts
lloyd tabb writes "I've been walking around for years saying that the history of technology is best told through the Geek T-shirts that were made during the development process. Geek Shirts are funny, insightful and often the only record of what really happened.
Recently, while cleaning out my closet, I realized that unless I did something, all this history was going to rot away.
Anyway, so I hacked, and here it is, Geekt.org, Geek History through T-Shirts. It's a user contributed site, so get your shirts and ditigal camera and fire away."
...they got a lot of free t-shirts at Netscape!
The book is Apple T-Shirts: A Yearbook of History at Apple Computer by Gordon Thygeson, January 1998. The book's web site is, logically enough, http://www.appletshirts.com/.
Unfortunately the web site says that holiday shipments will be made on "Monday, December 20th" implying that the last update to the site was in late 1999...so I don't know if it's still available.
Business Method Patents Northwest (you know who I mean :-) says it ships in "2-3 days", if you trust their estimates.
The proof really WAS in the pudding!
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Try again. Container tags are like this: <tag> ... </tag>. *Non*-container tags are like this: <tag/>, and have been since XHTML.
geeks are such nerds.
i could live a little longer in this prison
An Ex NeXT friend of mine has a T that says.. "The Gurney is the reward" Indeed it was..
What I wish I'd gotten, when I had the chance, was the LHS t-shirt with the Ghandi quote on it. That was so appropriate for the state of Linux at that time. Today, an appropriate t-shirt would have the word "Linux" with dollar signs all over it, because Linux is now a business, not a cult. Which is fine and dandy especially for someone like me who likes to eat! But it's good to remember that Linux survived just fine without the IBM's and Dells of the world.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I've probably got half a dozen Sun/Solaris/Java shirts from my dad in my apartment right now. And that's after picking the one I liked from the 3 or 4 he had. My favorite is "Friends Don't Let Friends Load Windows NT"
So now that Sun and Netscape have formed iPlanet, do they plan to take over the world with tshirts then?
I had a feeling you were going to say that.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
Actually, the site is not based on SlashCode, but rather on Lloyd's own homebrew (and GPL licenced) code Harvey.
Heh, when I was posting I had stileproject open in another window, I looked at it, thought if I had it on a T-shirt it would be funny (but tastless) and opted out of inculding the link.
:)
I know my male friends would find it funny, but I bet I would be crucified by my female friends (and they are the ones who are more important to impress!
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Definitely the funniest geek T has to be Martin on the Simpsons with his Wang T-shirt on the school bus saying something like I hope this commotion takes the attention away from my shirt!
Anybody want a peanut?
I can search for text, but when I arrive to a results page, I see the story of the t-shirt but I don't find the pictures. Are they there?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
That reminds me of the KMFMS image he did with Tux beating Bill Gates with a bat. It was my wallpaper for a while (when I was doing outsourced support for MS!) I'd LOVE to have it on a tee. http://www.kmfms.com/
None of the T-shirts were alll that old.
One I would have liked to have seen was the one that some guy wore to a DECUS Symposium years ago. It had printed on it the DCL code you needed to disable the VMS license manager. Apparently, DECUS officials quietly asked him to not wear it anymore.
Another one was from HP back in the '70s. The University was a beta site for MPE and got some goodies as a result. There was a poster that had a neat design and said `Homo Programmus'. One of the student admins (a classmate) got a T-shirt with that on it. I was bummed they didn't have more.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Heh. An old girlfriend of mine, less than well-endowed, had one that read Minifloppies.
They weren't really (floppy, that is).
-- Alastair
hmm... I've got a near mint Serdar Argic in a drawer somewhere. the huge iron-on type graphic doesn't breathe making it almost unwearable unless it's cold out.
Pity my wife gave the entire box of purple "WONK!" shirts to goodwill a while back. Damn, they were ugly
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Are there any companies out there that make girl-sized geek t-shirts? Most girls don't want to wear men's sized XL. They're way too baggy and don't look good. I'm 21 and I like to wear cute, small t-shirts. I want geek shirts that are made to fit women... small and form fitting :)
slashdot, the best DoS attack ever...
What ? Me, worry ?
When I was in Atari Computer Camp, I had a T-shirt that the press [yes, the press covered Atari Computer Camp like flies] loved: it simply said, "My Computer Understands Me."
I wish that I still had that shirt.
I wish that my computer understood me.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
My favorite t-shirt was from Apple. It was done up as a MacOS error dialog, and read:
with the arrow positioned over the [Cancel] button.
More generally, you can also get any shirt you want printed up and made available for sale at CafePress.com. Need a shirt printed up for your Quake clan? Toss 'em some artwork and they'll crank 'em out for you for $9.95 each. Go spelunking through their t-shirt index sometime; some of them are quite neat.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
c:\dos c:\dos>run run\dos\run
--------------------------------- Born Again Bourne Again Believer: New Life, GNU/Linux Be Free!
does anyone know how I can get goatse put on a t-shirt?
Sure do. There's a great company online called CafePress that you just upload images to, and they create a free storefront for you - you decide how much over the base price the user's cost is, and they do all the manufacturing, processing, and shipping, and cut you a check for the difference at the end of the month. Yes, there's NO OUT OF POCKET COSTS. Pardon the french, but it's a fucking brilliant business model. Wish I had thought of it!
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
There are some shirts with artwork by BRUTE! (of KMFDM album cover fame, in the US anyway). They depict a large catlike creature with headphones and a sly grin, brandishing a large blunt object and claws above a cowering Lars Ulrich.
This is what first came to mind when I saw the post... there is a wonderful book of collected Apple tee-shirts that I once perused at the Lib. of Congress... can't remember the copyright date, though... the shirts went back to the late 70's IIRC and the Macintosh era tees were impressive. I also remember somewhere that door plaques were also used for projects (Microsoft did/does(?) this)... now those would make a nice addition to the museum.
I flee dead people.
Exactly. And a timeline-view, preferably with the ability to show different sections in the hierarchy alongside each other, would be nice, too.
since its mostly dynamic/cgi pages.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
-this post is completely on-topic and should not be modded down.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
My wife ordered that shirt, and that is one of her favorites.
I want an Atari shirt! You know the Orange ones with the white logo. The problem is. I now need it in XXL!
Palin...
The book (which is here at amazon, by the way) has it's own web site as well.
I did a review of that book once for TidBITS, which you can find here
This is creepy, right now I have on a old blue SGI/Cray tee-shirt. Got it at Goodwill for $1.00. Goodwill seems the best place to fond these.
Front: (With SGI logo) "My other computer is a Cray"
Back: (With Cray logo) "My other computer is a SGI"
I even have an old WOW by Compuserve t-shirt. They sent it out after the service went down. Yes, I did use that service for about 3 months. In addition, there's my old XYvision shirt I store from my father.
While not geeky, a great shirt I have to wear at bars has a few masks of angry faces and underneath:
"there is only one..."
And under that has the Xanax logo! It seems to be an offical company shirt. Yet another great Goodwill find. I guess I have to photograph and scan some of these.
I have a smart math teacher then...He can both code, and he knew what my binary shirt said! I was pretty impressed.
(he had visited thinkgeek)
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What's REALLY scary is that the t-shirts are available in kids sizes.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
At least you can buy shirts in your size like that. I've been looking the last two hours and can't find anything smaller than a Large.
Guess it's some white paint and stencils for me. At least they'll be one of a kind. :)
-The Wicked One
I have no personal experience with them, anybody care to comment how they work?
German tshirts are at interhemd nerdwear. With texts like "alt+f4" and "/* no comment */".
dozens of them. I'll bet the rest of the veterans of the HMS #poopdeck can come up with a complete set amongst us.
garyr (owner of probably the only car still sporting a DV/X bumper sticker)
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Not a T-shirt, but hey... Usenix '83 had a button saying 'Sex, Drugs and UNIX' (yes, Unix was cool once :) - a few years later, another one was produced after the invasion of suits into Unixland, and read 'Condoms, aspirin and POSIX'.
Agreed, Joel Furr made some damn fine stuff. But the RSA shirt is on geekt, BTW.
I still wear my Serdar Argic shirt in my standard rotation. I'll scan it tonight when I get home.
Hmm... would other Usenet shirts qualify as Geek T's? For example, Suicide Squid from rec.arts.comics.* ?
p.s. If anyone has a Green Card Lawyer shirt they don't wear, I want to buy it! (L or XL, clean, wearable, no holes) Anyone?
Are you honestly asking me to pity you for being thin? Is that what you're asking? Oh, you poor, poor baby!
"I just eat and eat and eat, and I can't gain any weight. Woe is me."
"My Porsche and my new Ferarri can't both fit in my garage at the same time. I'll have to park one in the driveway. The horror!"
"So many attractive people want to have sex with me, I can't make up my mind. Pity me!"
Bite me, twig-boy.
before I know what a computer was, I was a medium. now i need to buy sysadmin size. (_._) -> my sysadmin sized belly.
I'm going to have to find it and send it into the site now...
/tma
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What's the MTBF on these things? Why stop at history? I'm going to start backing up my hard drive onto T-Shirts.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
but they seem to have been eaten by bugs :(
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free the mallocs!
My geekiest geek shirts are the ones I got from the New Mexico High School Supercomputing Challenge. I still wear mine: second annual 1991-1992 (cool black one with a Cray on it) and third annual (which coincidentally has the names of the winners of the poster/t-shirt contest, one of which is the name of a prominent kuro5hin user, and who I also knew in college; I showed up at his dorm once and he was like "that's me on your shirt, by the way."
Apple was a great company for geek tshirts. There may already be a site with a few of them, but it would be great to see all the old project and company tshirts again. Hopefully none of them are lost forever. This site is a great idea!
has a pseudo mac dialog box & says
Warning! Application programmer could not be
opened because of error of type AM!
it was advertising mactech magazine & you got it when you purchased a copy of code warrior...
Geek T-shirts: the only way to call your math teacher dumb without getting in trouble. (see thinkgeek if you dont understand what i just said)
I am !amused.
My favourite shirts have (well indented) code on them :-)
Moz.
see a Text Widget
http://www.somethingawful.com/askjeffk/
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
The server looks like it's already going to fall over. Somebody mirror these things quick.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
There is also a book about T-shirts at Apple. The book only covers up to about 1995, but still there are over 2500 shirts listed in the book!
Free Hans!
Next time you link to a new /code site, at least show some commonsense by grabbing the "Hemos" username.
I now 0wn Hemos@geekt.org. I am so l33t I scare myself. Yadda Yadda. (Oh, mom, do I *have to go to bed now?)
Chaz the l33t 3kr1p7 k1dd13.
how many "I (heart) my Amiga(tm)" shirts do
you think they're gonna get scans of?
http://www.appletshirts.com
They've even got a book out!
Kind of depends on your point of view, I guess. I know some guys who think it's the height of humor to teach their kids all sorts of inappropriate phrases and gestures, since kids can get away with it around strangers.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
It's a misprinted shirt: the stupid printer in the initial run printed the image on the back instead of the front, so it was printed again on the front.
It's the t-shirt sold as fundraising for a SF convention that has yet to happen (OdysseyCon 2001.) A nice monolith w/stars and sunrise over a planetscape picture.
It just screams geeky to me - even if it's not part of history (yet).
... and today's pet project has
My favorite from way back in my Tandy days was a T we had made up that said - IBM..... You may find better, but you'll never pay more
Death and poverty like me so much, they've brought friends!
It's amazing who you come across on slashdot.
I had exchanged emails with lloyd a while ago about his harvey system (what geekt.org is using)
And now I see him submitting slashdot articles.
Soon I will be getting to know my neighbors better through slashdot.
Made me Gig-gle though.
Get it? Like Torvalds couldn't come up with a good OS, so he's reduced to using C# on Win2K. Since Linux has failed and Microsoft has won and all...
What a weenie.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
This is a great idea, socially and historically, but I hope they expand to other articles of clothing. My circa 1996 Yahoo! cap (contest runner up, baby! :) ) would probably go well there, not to mention a gaggle of nice polos and rugbys.
Anyway, Internet History is a good thing, and I love to see it collected and displayed.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I am willing to pay as much as $50 for a take it tux tshirt!
http://www.rageout.net/takeittux.jpg
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
I had a shirt from 1992 for the GRiD PalmPad, which was a handheld tablet that used Jeff Hawkins' handwriting recognition for data collection and was ruggedized to withstand a three-foot drop onto concrete (if you crossed your fingers :) Anyway, the shirt said, "Beat me, byte me, make me check bad writes." I thought that was pretty clever, and I wore it proudly on a vacation back home to the East Coast. When I got back to Fremont and unpacked my suitcase, it was nowhere to be found.
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Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Too bad they didn't make one with the QuarterDuck though.
Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.
Who is Dennis Miller?
Nope. Ten cuts on the album, plus four prints makes "fourteen pictures".
teleny, friend of cats.
You don't even have the balls to write that to me without hiding behind the "Anonymous Coward" thing, so you shouldn't even be talking about pathetic. So, instead of me shutting the fuck up and dying, how about you just eat my shit? I'll even spoonfeed it to you if you like.
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evil adrian
evil adrian
Ah, the list goes on. (Anyone with these shirts and a digital camera wanna give these newbies a real "geek history through T-shirts" lesson?)
I think the explosion of geek t-shirts as a mode of expression and a symbol of being part of the geek world has arisen largely within the last few years due to online shopping and the rush of coolness associated with obscure slogans, or *gasp* source code on your T-shirt.
Most shirts made prior to this cultural rush were internal shirts made for product launches (team morale), or promotional shirts from early trade shows. Those would be very interesting indeed -- not the nth-million Mozilla shirt. Big yawn. The site only had one T from pre 1990. Not very exciting.
I've got National Computer Camps t's from the mid-80's. Anyone else go to NCC, back when there were only 2 campsites (national my ass!
My company had an oldest product T-shirt contest a few years back. Somebody won with a shirt from the 80s... pit stains and all!
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
All designs are available in open formats for any use, you're welcome to print or even sell designs. All we ask is that derived designs are distributed under the same license.
lloyd tabb hacked geekt.org and all I got was this slashdotted site.
you could put it with one of the pictures found on stileproject's "linux loving sluts" picture gallery, as well. ;)
here's a url:
http://www.stileproject.com/lls.html
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
Isn't this application begging for an IsItGeekOrNot page?
I show my pride with custom T-Shirts. I design Linux, BSD, GNOME, KDE, etc. T-shirts then print them out.
Anyway, the point is that if you want to show that you "proudly run a non f***ed up OS", I suggust that you run down to Office Depot, buy some T-shrit transfers and design yourself a Tee. I like to put software projects that I have created/worked on on mine, but you could put anything on yours.
Oh... wait... this is Slashdot, not "Martha Stewert Living".
- DESQview/X - DOS to the Power of X
- DESQview/X Solves Computing Problems
That's all I can remember off the top of my head. Have to go check the bottom of my dresser drawers...Edith Keeler Must Die
In general, slashcode is still designed as a linear news engine, not something like Everything designed more as a collaborative database being constantly revised in all directions. Still, the way they have geekt set up now, it seems to work just fine, so i wouldn't worry about that.
My only worry, though, is that unless they do some thinking ahead this site is not going to scale at ALL. Not because of shortcomings in slash; just because they haven't put any thought into what happens once this goes from some people sitting around and passing around pictures to a rather large database.
Specifically, every single posting seems way too isolated.
So, here are my humbly worthless two bits of advice to the maintainers of this page, should they read this article:
- You need to modify the database entries for each shirt to contain the date the shirt was printed. You need this. Once you have a whole bunch of shirts and you can't just read the entire archive at a glance anymore, it will become pretty much impossible to understand anything's place within the grand scheme of things. Being able to see shirts listed chronologically from Bell Labs--UNIX Project to Linux 2.4 release instead of listed chronologically by post date-- which might as well be randomly shuffled-- would make things a great deal more interesting, not to mention meaningful. Knowing that "IAUMA" is from 1995 and not 1983 helps. A lot.
- You ought to set up some kind of system where related t-shirts can be identified and linked together. Using slashdot's sections is nice. You may want to expand this, maybe into having each shirt be registered on a hierarchy of vague category->company->product or some such, so all your Power Macintosh G4 t-shirts aren't lumped together in a pile with obscure jokes involving AppleSoft BASIC. This really isn't important, but doing something like this, or some other way to hit a button on an entry and get similar and related t-shirts, would definitely make it much more interesting to browse your site later on. At the least, though, i would suggest you find ways to string together posts of shirts that were in series-- if someone goes through and notices that four of these netscape 4.5 t-shirts were printed at the same time in the same run (you usually see several variants of a single t-shirt being released at the same time, now don't you?) there should be a way to link them together as "same series".. you could use the comment areas for all this, but that will get unweildy *quick*. *shrug*
Also: What happens once people who are selling geek t-shirts-- copyleft, etc-- start posting all their new products on this site, essentially using it as free ad space? Is this something you want to encourage? If encouraged, do you want in some way to control it or segregate all the currently-for-sale t-shirts into a seperate section (since sold t-shirts would pretty quickly drown out "historical" t-shirts in volume) or maybe even charge for it?(by the way-- how hard would it be to rig together a "return random t-shirt entry" thing? that would be nifty :) )
All of this is, of course, assuming you're expecting for this to be something you seriously continue to update for a long time, and not something you work on for a few weeks, lose interest, and set it to drift (which is probably what would happen to it if I were in charge.. which is why it's a good thing i'm not in charge :) ).
So good luck, and fix those colours, boy!!
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Linux General Store sells t-shirts with this slogan on them, just click here to get one.
I had three of these things, and one should be hanging around somewhere........it's my favorite shirt, and I even went to geeks with guns in one of these (photo).
Hope this helps.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
browsing through the apple t-shirt website, and i came across this one which celebrates john-louis gassee's triumph over steve jobs in building an open-architecture macintosh.
from the blurb:
Jean-Louis Gassée had always thought the Macintosh needed an open architecture, like the Apple II computers, to make it successful. However, this conflicted with Steve Jobs' view of the Mac as an "appliance."
does anyone else find it interesting that steve spent most of yesterday hyping his new, partially open-source OS and spiffy new PCI-based G4's, and that john-louis now makes internet appliances?
made me laugh.
london is drowning and i live by river
I've seen several examples of quilts made out of
shirts at county fairs and such. Seen some with
running race themes, politic slogan themes,
and travel themes. Why not get your girlfriend
to do a nerd theme?
I just happen to be wearing my "Free the Berkeley 4.4!" shirt today from back when the AT&T vs. Berkeley suit was on everyone's mind, and we all wondered if we'd become wholy owned subsidiaries of the death star.
My other favorites:
The Madelbrot set USENIX shirt (Cincinatti, I think)
The OSI network model with "Financial" and "Political" added at the top of the stack with an arrow pointing to "Political" and a label: "You are here"
And for recent additions, I think "got root?" takes it.
That is the most awesome idea! The trick, though, is to get the shirts away from your rocker before he wears holes in them beyond the point of repair. :-)
/."
"I'm not a bitch, I just play one on
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
C:\
C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN - RUN DOS RUN
Lisa laughed at this and remarked "Only one person in a million would find that funny!"
To which another of the geeks replied, "Yes, we call that the Dennis Miller ratio."
Long live The Simpsons!!
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Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
was also a pickup line for geeks:
Don't be afraid baby - I won't byte but I might nibble a bit or two...
It was cute at the time...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
I love to wear one of my Linux shirts from Copyleft there is a small picture of Tux on the front, and a quote from Torvalds on the back: "The Linux Motto is 'Fear no danger.' Oops, wait, 'Do it yourself, that's it.'"
I was surprised by the reaction to the shirt, it went over very well even among non-geeks.
I had been looking for one with the following quote: "Software is like sex, its better when its free." I can't find one anywhere so I think I will have to make my own. (Do it yourself, that's it!)
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!