My Digital Collection
My AlphaMug
This item has a little bit of a story behind it. According to the story I was told, it was designed by engineers.
It was 1992, and inside Digital, we were ramping up for deployment. Lots of meetings and presentations, demos and documents were making their ways across the country and around the world. This was the time when Alpha was called "Alpha" -- not the product name, but the Internal Use Only project name.
Engineering was in charge, and strongly favored the Alpha moniker for the actual product name. They created a logo and started sticking it on material, from documents, to t-shirts (more about that in a future "My Digital Collection"), and even coffee mugs. Like this one, which I was fortunate enough to get during one of the many training classes I went to.
Then came Digital's infamous Stealth Marketing division. They didn't like the name, nor the logo. Everyone knows about how "Alpha" is too generic a term and not trademark-able, so they came up with "AXP". Which turned into "Alpha AXP". Which turned into "Alpha". But this logo was considered too busy, too complex, and had too many colors. It wasn't "cost effective" to reproduce, because it would take at least 3 colors to print.
So before Alpha, before Alpha Generation, or Alpha Powered, even before Alpha aXP, there was this Alpha logo.
I've always thought it was the coolest of the lot.
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