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Paleontological Musings On Tux? 40

Posted by Cliff from the a-fun-story-for-a-late-night dept.
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?"
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Paleontological Musings On Tux? More

Paleontological Musings On Tux?

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  • Scan of the Book? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Stubtify ( 610318 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @02:50AM (#6509101)
    Maybe post a scan of the book so we can see what it looks like too. Not all of us will be able to make it to that SVLUG meeting.

  • Ask Darl McBride (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @02:53AM (#6509116)
    Perhaps you should ask Darl McBride of SCO. He owns UNIX and every penguin in the whole world.

  • 68015? 68012! (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There never was a 68015. There were 68000 and 68008 and 68012 and 68020 and some more.

    • Re:68015? 68012! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ivanmarsh ( 634711 )
      A google for motorola 68015 sure does point to a lot of pages about a chip that never existed.

      • A google for motorola 68015 sure does point to a lot of pages about a chip that never existed.

        No.

        If you actually look at the entries, Google shows a small number of hits none of which are for a 68015 processor (although the first one sorta implies one but a "VME 68015" doesn't imply a 68015 processor; it's probably a typo anyway).

        There was the ubiquitous 68000, a somewhat common 68010, an exceedingly rare if ever produced in quantity 68012, never a 68015, then a 68020. That and the rest is well doc

  • "paleontology" of Linux. (Score:3, Funny)

    by torpor ( 458 ) <ibisum@gma i l .com> on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @04:04AM (#6509388) Homepage Journal
    I once found my old Yggdrasil boot CD's floating around at the bottom of an old dusty box, and just for grins I fired it up on a PC I had spare at the time.

    Holy smokes, was Yggdrasil ever FAST!!! :) I remember having to wait 20 minutes for my old 486 box to boot from those CD's (well, okay, I was using the 'live CD' boot to X feature of Ygg, heh heh heh ...) but these days, on the PC's we have now, holy smokes is all I can say!

    Really fun to see the old Linux distro's, anyway. If you ever find a 1.0 release from a Linux distro - keep it!
  • Back in late 1997, I started a thread suggesting a mascot for KDE. For awhile there it looked like we were going to get a inanimate object:

    http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde&m=88665769314384&w =2 [kde.org]

    I orginally wanted a real animal (like Tux is) but to throw the inanimate object ideas out I compromised in agreeing to imaginary animals. Later, after an informal design competition of sorts, we ended up with our choice, Konqi.

    http://www.kde.org/stuff/ [kde.org]

    It's the only open source mascot I can say I've ever c

  • 68008 & 68012 (Score:1, Informative)

    by KMAPSRULE ( 639889 )
    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.
  • Has Anyone in the area noticed the relatively recent addition of the pedestrian crossing signs outide the Oracle building showing a family of penguins crossing the road. Especially cute since the area also has signs showing ducks crossing the road.

  • Penguin = fix this (Score:5, Informative)

    by MarkusQ ( 450076 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @12:26PM (#6512286) Journal

    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

    • Wasnt Redhat, the company, named that way because one of the co-founders had a Red Fedora hat stolen from him?

      • All I know is that one of their installation slide shows offered a whole slew of (sometimes mutually contradictory) explanations of where the name came from. That may well have been among them, but I have no idea if it's the one true reason(tm).

        -- MarkusQ

  • The Linux mascot (Score:4, Informative)

    by SN74S181 ( 581549 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @02:31PM (#6513453)
    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.

    • Picture (Score:4, Informative)

      by radon28 ( 593565 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @07:19PM (#6516640)
      Ibiblio has a picture of the platypus here [ibiblio.org].
    • This isnt true. Linus made that joke in the release email for one of his 2.0 kernel's i think - but only a few years ago, certainly /long/ after the Penguin became the Linux mascot.

      Larry Ewing designed the Linux Penguin mascot quite a while ago. I dont know if he thought of using a penguin or whether Linus did.
    • What is the deal with Linus and Australian critters??? If I have been related the story accurately, it was a fairy penguin at an Australian zoo that went Linus... course, fairy penguins are darkly frightening and devious animals, being neither odd, posionous nor sheep; meaning they dont accurately fit into the Douglas Adams taxonomy of Australian Animals.

      Dont get me wrong, I like our whacky critters here... except wombats, they is scary little walking speed humps.

      err!
      riprjak
    • According to O'Reilly's _Running Linux_, first edition, the storm petrel (a big white sea bird) was adopted as the mascot of the Linux project. That was back in the days of 1.0.x or 1.2.x - the penguin was a logo for Linux 2.0.

  • News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. (Score:5, Funny)

    by metamatic ( 202216 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @04:37PM (#6514862) Homepage Journal
    Since something from 1983 clearly isn't "news", I can only assume that this is considered stuff that matters.

    In which case, gods help us all.
  • According to the startling new evidence surfacing amidst the preparations on behalf of SCO for the Crusade, we may have been horribly mistaken on the origins of the UNIX operating system.

    The new data suggests that the UNIX operating system was originally developed by penguins in the early 1850's! Due to the low temperatures in Antarctica, silicon actually had developed rudimentary sentience, enabling this important scientific breakthrough. The specific breed of penguins responsible is supposedly the fabl
  • Does anyone else think it's strange that the topic icon for this story is "Technology/IT", not our friendly little Tux ("Linux")?

    Talking about him behind his back, eh?

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