The megaprofitable shoe company Nike has its ubiquitous "swoosh" logo plastered on every exposed surface of every superstar athlete nowadays who will accept its cash. (It's unclear what connection this has with making good footwear, but no matter.)

The other day that curvy corporate icon reminded me suddenly of another one-time omnipresent commercial symbol: the Amiga check. It's the symbol of a much-beloved but now virtually-defunct computer system, arguably far ahead of its time. For a while the Amiga logo was ubiquitous in ".sig" (signature) lines at the ends of emails and USENET newsgroup postings. It was often rendered something like:

                                      / // /
        /  //  /                     / // /
       /  //  /                     / // /
  __ _/_ //  /       or            / // /
 \  \\  \/  /              __ __  / // /
  \   \    /               \ \\ \/ // /
   \__/\__/                 \ \\/ // /
                             \ V /V /
                              \_/\_/

These examples of the Amiga logo in turn brought to mind "alt.fan.warlord", a meta-newsgroup focused on " ... the discussion and critisism of signatures over four lines long ...". Years ago I liked to lurk on AFW just to see the amazing ASCII art that some people developed for the sign-off portions of their posts.

(see also PersonalComputerHistory (25 Feb 2002), ... )

TopicOrganizations - TopicArt - TopicPersonalHistory - 2004-05-19

(correlates: SecretOrigins, AnAcknowledgement, SalesPitch, ...)