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Maddog's New Hampshire "Unix" Plate Turns 20
An anonymous reader writes "Local newspaper talks to Linux International's Jon 'maddog' Hall, who lives in New Hampshire, and who since 1989 has had a 'Live Free or Die' UNIX license plate — a real one, not a conference hand-out — on his Jeep. From the story:
'The day he installed the UNIX plates, he went early to work at DEC's office on Spit Brook Road in Nashua, to be sure to get the parking space right next to the door used by all the Unix engineers. He watched them come in and, one after another, do a double take at seeing the real-world version of the famous fake plate. "People would race in and yell, 'Who is it? Whose plate is it?!?'" Hall said. It was his then and it is his now. After 20 years, one suspects you will have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers.'"
Live Free ....or DIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!
So much better than "Famous Potatos"
RIP Carlin.
It is always nice to see a nerd plate. I've had TCPIP here in Oregon since the mid 90s, and I am surprised how often a fellow nerd notices.
Don't be fooled by this deceptive motto! In New Hampshire, the Motto "Live Free or Die" actually means: "Do exactly what the government tells you and you will remain free to continue obeying us; if you don't you just might wake up dead son." I know. I lived there long enough to have the "pleasure" ...
Also, it should be: "Live for a Fee: UNIX" Obviously Linux (or GNU/Linux if it wasn't too long to fit) belongs in place of UNIX, but to Maddog's defense Linux hadn't been conceived when he got the plate.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It's little known in the nerd community that "unix" has also negative conotations for example in certain ghettos in california an unix is a one-legged chinese hooker.
I wonder how long it takes until someone is offended.
I saw a chick driving a car with a Connecticut LINUX plate in Danbury. I just about divorced my wife right then and there. :)
From TOFA:
Exactly how many are there?
It spent years on the front of a 1987 Mazda 626 I bought new. I don't remember when I got it but it had to be before 1989. When I noticed the plate was getting rusty, I took it off and hung it in my office.
Live free or die? Make me!
I live near Spitbrook and I've seen that plate around the area for years. I've never known the story behind it though.
" Je me souviens."
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Impressive, but can you install UNIX on it?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
My late father had "RS 232" as his license plate on his PT Cruiser. It's not as cool and hard-to-get as UNIX, I suppose, but considering recent popularity of UNIX derivatives in general it's certainly more obscure in the geek crowd.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Microsoft?
I had the great opportunity many years ago to meet Maddog at a NHLUG meeting. Very awesome and knowledgeable man.
Much respect.
-cb
The summary made me do a double-take, and if you RTFA you will see the summary is wrong. The real plate isn't based on the fake plates. The fake plates were a copy of Armando's plate long ago, he made them himself. When Armando left New Hampshire, maddog apparently took over the plate.
I have one of the fake plates from Usenix, when Armando had dec make them.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
I don't believe the latter is optional.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Man, I can't imagine living 20 years in one state.
Too bad Ontario's license plates don't read "Loyal We Began and Loyal We Remain" anymore. That would make a great Windows one in the future... :)
What is also too bad is that Quebec's doesn't say "Screw You" more explicitly. "MICROSOFT : Je me souviens" doesn't cut it.
I've been a Linux fan since late 1992 when I could download the whole thing to a couple of high-density floppy disks (which I still have). Anyone remember the "SLS" distro? A co-worker pointed me to a Maine DMV site in the late '90s where you could check for available plates. Someone already had the "generic" Maine LINUX plate, but I was able to register "LINUX" with the conservation version of the plate. I've had it ever since. My family and I may move down south next year - anyone in Maine interested in getting a call at the exact moment I register the vehicle in another state (thereby indicating that the Maine plate I've been hogging is available)? :-)
MY license plate says: /dev/car
Which makes me the device driver!
The article summary leaves out the best part. DEC had its own competitive operating system, called VMS and made the Unix people (rightfully) live in the shadow of it.
VMS was truly an awesome operating system. It had the kind of command line interpreter (shell) that you could turn a secretary loose on (1000x easier and more powerful than DOS), but it could be frustrating for anyone familiar with Unix to deal with and for DEC, which invented multi-tasking, Ethernet, clustering, distributed file systems and a lot of other stuff, TCP/IP was a total after-thought, never mind that the first commercially available Ethernet controllers on the VAX ran XNS/ITP (not DECnet), a fore-runner of TCP/IP. The reason for this was that DEC was in the process of migrating $15bn/yr worth of high-end customers from DECnet to the newly created industry failure called OSI. Nobody expected TCP/IP to be more than a stop-gap until some SOB created the PPP protocol enabling asynchronous dial-up connections to handle TCP/IP traffic thus condemning the world to the Hell we have to day (without distance based pricing of async X.25/aka X.PC, viruses, spam, hackers troll the universe proclaiming how genius they are for being able to crack the very foundation of the Internet, TCP/IP itself, when the reality is that all those holes in TCP/IP were very well known and understood but were largely irrelevant when the only peers on the Net were businesses and universities --extending it to people's homes over X.PC (or even UUCP) was an extraordinarily Bad thing that happened right underneath our government and press RADAR). Roll the clock forward 10 years and you get a kid living in the shadow of Communist Russia running around with his copy of Andy's Minix book, he downloads some free crap from a long-time Communist who had been holed up on an academic payroll in Massachusetts rallying against DEC (not Microsoft) which sold the incredibly expensive (but incredibly awesome) VMS and it's layered products which he couldn't get funding for and, well, the rest is history --including the US economy. The little side-plot of Bill Gates hiring away the VMS A-Team and creating NT while ripping off the Apple GUI which was ripped off from Xerox PaARC ..and the rise of PCs/Macs, collapsing DEC and costing us 25 years to get back to essentially what the DEC GiGi was in 1982 are of little concern now. SUN (which had to file bankruptcy to reinvent itself to compete against the VAX) is gone now (part of ORACLE, which will be gone soon). Apple is just about history (have you pre-ordered your Pre yet?) Windows is going supernova and Linux is being pinned down --turned into a runtime environment that runs under Hypervisors on timesharing (excuse me, I meant "cloud") infrastructure (LOL), and as a base for running WebKit on embedded platforms. Exactly as it should be. How they are going to deal with an entire generation (and a big friggin generation at that) full of kids who grew up in the menagerie between DEC GiGi/VAX in 1982 and where we will be in 2010, I do not know. I hope they at least have the good sense to abandon .NET and J2EE while they are still young enough to retrain in JavaScript-based web-frameworks and parallel (excuse me, I mean "multi core") Linux application development.
At American Express in Phoenix, I worked with someone that had Nevada UNIXOS. Jim, you still around?
Still trying to parse this line of code:
"This is the vital point: Bell Labs was the pure-research division of AT&T, which as a regulated utility gave its computer researchers free rein out of fears about regulators looking askance at a telecommunications firm dabbling in other areas."
That can be arranged...
You still can, if you choose a similarly small distro.
And mani interesting furry animals
Not funny. A møøse one bit my sister :(
http://gallery.me.com/gordonsclyne#100021
my favorite XMT RCV..... for all you serial lovers out there.
... in fact, one of my favorites ever, said:
+ZEUS-
While it's not 100% clear, I've always read this as "powered by Zeus" (as if Zeus were a battery).
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
So tempting...
... fake New Hampshire license plates naming Unix or its various flavors, including Linux, are a staple of the computing industry.
I don't think that author understands the meaning of staple.
No.
To beat a bunch of UNIX engineers? I guess he got in at about 10.30am
I pick up young males with it. That wasn't my intent, but hindsight is 20/20, isn't it?
This brings back memories. I went to the Spit Brook site once for 3 weeks in the mid 90's to spend 3 weeks with the DEC MLS+ engineering team. At the time that was the B1/CMW (Compartmented Mode Workstation) high security variant of Digital Unix. There were no training courses, so I had to go learn it from the horses mouth, so to speak, so I could support it when I got back home. I remember Spit Brook well for 3 reasons:
- Great atmosphere at the place. People were excited and enthusiastic about what they were doing. And I'd never seen such a collection of raw talent in one place before. Really bowled me over.
- It was in the middle of the biggest pine forest I'd seen in my life. Walking out the hotel in the morning I would just stop or 5 minutes and breath it all in. Never experienced air like that before, or since.
- I got invited to a cook out (had never heard that expression before) and while there I got attacked by this mahoosive black fly. I thought I'd managed to avoid getting bitten, but when I got back to the UK I discovered several strange looking bites. A red spot surrounded by a large white circle and a red ring around that. Only time in my life I've ever seen a UK doctor routing through a text book to work out what I had. He eventually diagnosed it as Lyme Disease. Apparently the fly picks it up from feeding on deer. We don't get it in the UK. A course of antibiotics shifted it.
Oh, and there was a 4th reason: Diane Lebel. I should never have left, or turned around and gone straight back. Enough said ;-)
Can plates from other states also use UNIX? When I was in school, one of my professors also had a plate that says UNIX. Maybe he sold it to Maddog?
I wrote:
> --extending it to people's homes over X.PC (or even UUCP) was an extraordinarily Bad thing
when I should have wrote:
--extending TCP/IP to people's homes via PPP over continuing to use X.25 over then emerging X.PC (or even UUCP) was an extraordinarily Bad Thing
(Hey, It's Sunday!)
Just saw gnu-gcc today. Which one of you NH nerds had that one? Oh, and I see pwned guy around quite a bit, today at Star Trek wasn't much of a shock.
I like music
I know her .. you're better off with your current wife.
MICRO~1
the one that says BORK
I had DEV AUTO on my car back in '92 or so. After a few years, the car died, and I went for a while w/out (sharing only my wife's car). Some years later, I put the plate up on my office wall, at which point a co-worker promptly registered the tag for his own car. He's still got it (probably about 10 years for him, now). Bastard.
Recently, I saw "NICE -20" on a car (a 'Vette or similar fast muscle car). Laughed out loud when I saw that one....
Is/Was owned by George Gobel of Purdue University. He had it since the early 80's, but I had heard that it had been stolen too many times, so he gave it up.
George has the distinction of having the first website that was slashdotted, long before slashdot. He had a video on his website of the world's fastest lighting of a barbeque grill. He took it from stone cold to slagged down in a few seconds. His site was mentioned in a Dave Barry column, and the poor sparc than ran his workstation couldn't keep up. (He did win an ignoble prize for the barbeque lighting.)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I had the original NH UNIX license plates. (Still have them actually.) I got them in 1980 when I went to work for DEC. I had to give them up in 1982 when I went to work for Sun. They were the prototype for plates we handed out at Usenix conferences for several years, and morphed into Ultrix plates some years after I left.
When I moved to CA I had to settle for the VMUNIX plates.
- Bill Shannon
Here in the UK we have had a variety of numbering systems, one of which was a letter, one to three numbers and three letters eg 'A 1(23) BCD'.
Therefore some lucky? person somewhere might have V 1 STA!
Smivs on the intertubes!
Yeah, or the REALLY ?lucky? person who gets stuck with V 14 GRA
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
What is Sig?
I've had "DEV CAR" in Maryland for over twenty years. It's on its third car, which I call DEV CAR 3.0.
I worked with a guy who did third party consulting on DEC equipment and one day he picked up the phone and dialed D-I-G-I-T-A-L and offered the person $100 plus expenses to transfer their number to his company. They accepted, so he could tell people his number was DIGITAL. It was like "Who's on first?". ...
"What's your phone number?"
"It's DIGITAL". (pronounced, not spelled out)
"Okay,.... but what is it?"
"I just gave it to you?"
"You said it was digital."
"Right, it's DIGITAL."
"Okay, so it has digits in it, but what are they?"
It was more trouble than it was worth, but it bugged the hell out of the local DEC office.
Of course it's a HP office now...
I've had my plate for quite some time...
http://www.helpfiles.us/public/pics/linuxcar.jpg