A little while ago I posted my thoughts on spring cleaning and how best to avoid it. Well, today it finally caught up with me, and I decided to take a hard look at my closet. At the back, neatly arrayed on hangers and covered with tissue, were all of my oldest Sun t-shirts, dating back to 1985. The collection included a dozen different shirts for PC-NFS, dating from 1986 (“PC-NFS: More fun in the Sun”) to 1996 (the tenth anniversary of the first customer shipment). Some were a bit threadbare,a few had yellowed with age, some of the silk-screening had faded….
Also in the stack was the notorious “grilled chameleon” shirt. Way back in the early 1990s, a little software house called NetManage was going around claiming that it had invented a bunch of PC networking technologies. Those of us that had actually done the invention (from companies like Sun, FTP Software, Beame & Whiteside, and Microsoft) were more than a little ticked off at this. So the guys at B&W came up with a shirt showing a bunch of geeks (tolerable likenesses, actually) barbecuing a chameleon, which was NetManage’s logo. We all signed copies of the shirt, and a couple were raffled for charity.
[Note: I just checked out NetManage’s website, and they are still repeating the lies about their involvement in the Windows Sockets work. Just for the record: the authors of the WinSock spec were Mark Towfiq (then of FTP), Martin Hall (JSB), Dave Treadwell and Henry Sanders (both Microsoft) and myself (Sun). We started by considering the implementations from our four companies, plus that of NetManage. The result was different from all five. There never was any “reference implementation”; interoperability was worked out at a series of multivendor testing sessions. The engineers from NetManage admitted that their claims were baseless, but told us that Zvi (the founder) insisted on them. Sad that one of the first genuinely collaborative initiatives of the Internet era should be turned into a pissing contest. Oh, well.]
Anyway, enough with old shirts that I’ll never wear. Out they all go.