This is the cup design.
Ah, yes. All the way back to November 1999. The olden days, when the world cringed at the thought of having all those numbers switching over and comets wiping out all the dates in all the computers. Or something like that. Like I said, it's difficult to remember that far back.
Now, Pterodactyl had been going since 1998, and the mugs were sorta done to celebrate that Pterodactyl was over. Well, not really, but I was so late in doing the mugs that it was over by the time the mugs were done.
I'm guessing that the mugs were the peak of the Gnus merchandising madness. More than six hundred mugs were sold. Six hundred mugs packaged in styrofoam, addressed, stamped and sent out. Oh, the toil. The horror. The book keeping. It's all coming back to me now.
Since it was getting rather obvious to me that quite a lot of these mugs were going to be sold, I found out that I had to take Visa. To take Visa, I had to use SSL. To use SSL, I had to become a firm, since SSL server certs aren't given out to private persons.
So the firm «Programmerer Ingebrigtsen» was established, servers set up, certs bought, and a shopping system whipped up in php. Orders rolled in, Visa gave me oodles of money, and I shipped out oodles of mugs.
Actually, it was a gas. Great fun. Anything done for the first time is fun, and I got to do lots of new things. Even the packing was fun -- I sat packing mugs into pre-fab styrofoam while watching «Prisoner: Cell Block H» on TV, and was happy.
The mugs were done in two batches. The first batch used red ink. The second used silver ink. The second batch also has two horisontal lines left out by mistake on the first batch. (My mistake; not the mug peoples.)
This is the cup design.
This is the first batch of mugs. To the left, the tower of polystyrened mugs. To the right, the tower of addressed and stamped mugs. That's around 200 mugs, or one third of the total number of mugs.
And here are some pictures of the finished mugs, taken May 1st 2003, when I discovered that I hadn't published this page, and didn't have any pictures of the actual mugs.
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Still shiny after all these years. Although the red print mugs we have at the office have lost their lustre. And most of the red color.
I found the idea of doing temporary Gnus tattoos irresistably
silly, and since I'm not very good at resisting the irresistable,
I made some. I still have tons left; if I ever do another Gnus
merchandising thing, I'll just give them away with other orders.
Here we see a happy Gnus user.