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."

Comments

My Favorite, and a Good Resource

[ewhac]

My favorite t-shirt was from Apple. It was done up as a MacOS error dialog, and read:

The Apple engineer "unknown" has unexpectedly quit.
[[Do something]] [Cancel]

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

history is in the sizes

[holzp]

before I know what a computer was, I was a medium. now i need to buy sysadmin size. (_._) -> my sysadmin sized belly.

Re:c:\dos

[mmontour]

How about the Apple ad that ran just after Microsoft finaly launched the much-hyped Windows 95? It said simply:

C:\ONGRTLNS.W95

This needs some order

[mcc]

mcc begins his ramble

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.

  (by the way-- how hard would it be to rig together a "return random t-shirt entry" thing? that would be nifty :) )

• 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?

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!!

What about making your own?

[Mr. Flibble]

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!)