Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
For those that are too lazy to look it up: Article 10
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
"Live Free XNOR Die" then.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
(or GNU/Linux if it wasn't too long to fit)
The most you can have is 7 letters on NH plates.
It may not be, and that is the whole point. Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils. -- Gen John Stark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Free_or_Die
Plates with "H8" in them referred to as "hate plates" have been banned in the state, there was a big to-do about it a number of years ago when they started revoking plates with that in them.
FWIW I live in NH and all of my cars have vanity plates. Though only one of them is nerdy.
Collector's Edition
"I remember."
how is babby formed?
Pretty simple if you know the history.
AT&T was a government-regulated monopoly. As part of the understanding under which the U.S. Government gave it that monopoly, AT&T was not allowed to use the base granted by their monopoly to expand into other fields.
Bell Labs was AT&T's R&D division. A lot of what they did went into AT&T's products, as you might expect. However, because of the agreement with the government against expanding into other fields, anything that Bell Labs did which wasn't directly for AT&T's own equipment was generally given out to others to use. From which we get Unix, which was developed as an experiment in a portable operating system that could be ported to any machine for which you had a compiler. Also from which we got other things like the transistor.
Bell Labs was one of those rare things that can happen when you give very smart people free rein, and it was an unfortunate casualty when the whole monopoly status of AT&T was changed.
I live in Luxembourg and I have never seen them either. That said, they seem to be genuine. At the manufacturers site Micro&Soft and Linux. Perhaps they are sold in Switserland (.ch)?