Simpsons creator Matt Groening once drew Mac heaven for Apple Welcome to another edition of Conference Couture, in which we relive odd moments of technology history through the branded tat given away at trade shows. This week, one for the Apple completists. Back in 1989 Apple was huge in education. But wanted to be huger, by getting university students to buy more Macs. And what better …
Copyright? It's a great cartoon and I can see lots of people thinking about heading off to their local T-shirt printer clutching a USB stick...Not that any (extremely law-abiding) El Reg commentards would think of any such blatant copyright violation of course.
Also, though I am not an IP lawyer, it would seem anything printed in a T-shirt might be captured in a photograph of a crowd... it seems unfair if that photographer couldn't distribute his photograph because he'd unwittingly snapped a pic of a copyrighted image on someones clothes.
I first saw a Matt Groening cartoon in the early 80s, well before 'The Simpsons'. The next door office had 'The Nine Types of Bosses' from the 'Work is Hell' series on the wall.
As for tat, I used to go to DAVIC workshops in the mid 90's. The process was putting together standards for digital media distribution - streaming & broadcast. One of them was held at the Beverly Hilton in LA to try to get Hollywood interested in what we were doing, and it was the one & only time we all got a goody bag of tat. One was a T-shirt from Apple with 'Windows 95 is Macintosh 89' on the front. I wore that for years. Another was a frisbee from Novell with 'The Billion Node Network' on it. Laughable in hindsight but I seem to remember it was a bit of a joke even then.
There were a couple of Alpha's in the physics department at UQ before 1994; they may have been blindingly fast, but seemed less so when you didn't have (i.e. couldn't afford) enough memory and had to do large matrix calculations by swapping virtual memory off disk. I recall my computations were so i/o bound that I got maybe 4% of the cpu speed.
Not the fault of the machine, though, which was quite nice.
Not quite.... Alpha was snuffed by Compaq, who were persuaded by Intel that there was no point trying to compete with Itanium. As a result, Intel bought the Alpha IP (and engineering team) from Compaq, but only to assimilate into the Itanium project.
Itanium might have been a colossal flop as a product, but it served the purpose of killing off the Alpha (and high-end MIPS) processor architectures.
I think Compaq was owned by HP at that time, so you can see it as yet another great post-Bill Hewlett/Dave Packard blunder by HP. I feel the need to troll HP by asking how those Itanium sales are doing, but I will avoid that iceberg for now.
Prior to its death, the Alpha chip was regularly top of the floating-point speed results for the "SETI at home" screen-saver and signal processor.
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