Bite Of The Apple


Bite Of The Apple

"On either side, Thalia saw the tapering stalks of the Museum of Cybernetics, each structure rising at least a hundred metres into the air, each surmounted by a smooth blue-grey sphere, each sphere marked with a symbol from the hallowed history of information processing. There was the ampersand, which had once symbolised a primitive form of abstraction. There was an ever-tumbling hourglass, still the universal symbol for an active computational process. There was the apple with a chunk missing which (so Thalia had been led to believe) commemorated the suicidal poisoning of the info-theorist Turing himself."

From Aurora Rising by Alastair Reynolds.

The relatively simple origins of the rainbow colored Apple logo hasn’t stopped some from reading a bit too much into what it represents. Jean-Louis Gassée, former Apple executive and founder of BeOS, quipped about the logo:

"One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn’t dream a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope and anarchy."



Comments

  1. Richard BensamApril 24, 2018 at 4:23 PM

    Strange how the colors being shifted upward so green is at the top instead of red caused Gassée to perceive them as random and chaotic. Anyone could see they're still in the correct order!

    Edit: well, shifted and flipped vertically, if one insists. But still in the right sequence.

    ReplyDelete

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