Slashdot Mirror
Paleontological Musings On Tux?
ibm1130 asks: "I was unpacking, since I had recently moved from Virginia back to Silicon Valley, and I came across an old piece of technological ephemera. To whit a 'UNIX Pocket Guide' issued by Link Advanced Products Division, an entity once housed in what is now the Fry's in Sunnyvale, CA and for whose parent I once toiled in upstate NY. I'm not sure where I really got the thing. The booklet is dated Aug 1983 and on the front cover is a small cartoon of a penguin in front of a computer console. I'll probably take the thing to this year's SVLUG UNIX picnic. Now it's highly unlikely that Linus ever saw a copy of the booklet, although Finnair did have some Link-built flight simulators at one point, in the correct 90's time-frame, and some of them may have been hosted on UNIX boxes (possibly Motorola board sets in Schroff boxes with 68010 or 68015 chips for CPUs, IIRC ). It is however kind of interesting that Linus wasn't the first person to associate our mascot with the Unix continuum. A later version of the same booklet is a much slicker product but is minus the cartoon and the Link APO attribution. Does anybody have/know of an older instance of the Penguin-Unixverse connection?"
There never was a 68015. There were 68000 and 68008 and 68012 and 68020 and some more.
They were 68008's and 68012's I believe although I haven't worked with many of those products Since I have Worked here in "upstate"!? NY at what used to be the Mother Link and is now a sad ghostly shell of what it once was. But the Link Advanced Products Division, Produced some awsome documents, I haven't seen the one you have referferenced but I found a copy of the Engineering Handbook they produced while cleaning out a cube so I could work in it, It is a treasure trove of info.
--Im an oven mitt, not an engineer! (SLArbys Radio Commercial)
In the dying days of the "fuzzy bunny slipper era" (late 1970's) there were an enormous number of in-jokes and goofy conventions floating around. One was to insert a real word (such as "penguin" or "plover") that would not normally be used in the context (mostly technical documentation) to mark sections that needed to be revistied / finished before release. There were all sorts of games that you could play with spelling dictionaries, etc. to make use of this.
"Red hat" (as in "you have the red hat") used to mean you were suck with some chore (often making or defending a descision that required a lot of conscensus building but ultimately didn't matter, such as what to call a product internally or where to have lunch). One place I worked even had some red baseball caps they threw around (litterally) to pass the buck. I think other places used pumpkins or rubber ducks for the same purpose. (In one company I head of the role was "chairman of the yellow panel"--meaning you and a half dozen rubber ducks had to do it.)
Damn, now I feel old.
-- MarkusQ
The Penguin mascot was chosen for Linux in part as a joke because Linus had been bitten by a penguin when visiting the zoo on a field trap after speaking at a LUG.
The previous Linux mascot was a platypus. I liked the Linux platypus logos a LOT more than the Penguin stuff. The Platypus logo artwork can be found in ancient Linux archives. I am not sure where they are online, but I have them on some of my older Linux CDROM sets.
Here are links to scans of the front and back cover of the first Yggdrasil Linux distro:
Front cover
Back cover
Ibiblio has a picture of the platypus here.