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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.'"
It is always nice to see a nerd plate
And in this instance, the story is quite interesting.
Armando P. Stettner (aps for you old folks) got the plat initially. Then in 1989 after aps moved on from DEC, Jon Hall got it.
How appropriate that the president of Linux International copies a Unix guy's smart idea. :)
There is a PERL-TK New Hampshire plate cruising about as well. That one registers especially high on the geek scale.
I have a friend whose last name starts with P. His parents gave him and his brother the initials TCP and IP.
All your base are belong to Wii.
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.
Call me sceptical, but this is remiscent of the bullshit entries near the bottom of the list on Urban Dictionary (3 thumbs up from the submitter and friends, 10 thumbs down from everyone else who stumbled across that piece of nonsense).
I live near Spitbrook and I've seen that plate around the area for years. I've never known the story behind it though.
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?"
Well considering NH has the highest number of vanity plates per capita, I'd say, quite a few. I personally like the Linux and BSD license plates better, though those from NH would probably agree IH8RT3 is also in the top tier.
RT3 isn't that bad, that's one of the major routes to/from NH (just select direction after preference! :-) )
The worst thing I can think of when it comes to NH is the lousy GSM coverage when you get outside the main routes. New Boston lacks coverage, even though that's a really nice place otherwise. (At least it did last summer...)
And yes - I'm one of those lousy tourists pestering NH sometimes... Visiting from Sweden.
As for vanity plates - that's the headache of the owner if he's willing to pay for it. And from what I have found out the people in NH has a certain attitude that makes them willing to make a statement - like using vanity plates. Maybe the "Free" in the slogan is taken much as freedom of speech.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Free as in beer or free as in speech?
Hey, I've had HAL 9000 in Virginia for over 20 years. Nobody made a big deal over that one.
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 ;-)
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.)
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