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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."
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.
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.
Actually, the site is not based on SlashCode, but rather on Lloyd's own homebrew (and GPL licenced) code Harvey.
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.
--
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
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
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.
My wife ordered that shirt, and that is one of her favorites.
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.
How is this funny? It seems more like an admission of defeat to me.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
It's making fun of the fact that Micros~1 finally got long file names - something UNIX had had for quite some time and that Mac had had since 1984. Mac, of course, has a file-name-length-limit that's half of the limit of windows and 1/8th the limit of Linux (my kernel, anyway).
<BR><BR>
It's also making fun of the fact that W95 still had DOS underneath.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
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?
before I know what a computer was, I was a medium. now i need to buy sysadmin size. (_._) -> my sysadmin sized belly.
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
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.
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!
How about the Apple ad that ran just after Microsoft finaly launched the much-hyped Windows 95? It said simply:
C:\ONGRTLNS.W95
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!
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
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.
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
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!
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...
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!