10 ms·

The Prince symbol has been salvaged from a 1993 floppy disk

232 points by glitcher 5y ago

teajunky 5y ago
The name doesn't matter to me. I would like to hear these five hundred songs
bob332 5y ago
Lol sex is binary, anyone who thinks otherwise is utterly delusional
jonplackett 5y ago
CompuServe. That's a name I forgot I used to know so well!
- AutumnCurtain 5y ago
  I still have a freebie shirt they gave me in like 1994. Who knew it would outlast them
  - fullstop 5y ago
    I have a Sun Microsystems shirt from the same era. It still fits!
    - mnw21cam 5y ago
      I was given a Sun t-shirt that had been compressed into a surfboard shape at a conference. Unfortunately they gave me a size that could probably have fitted three of me in, so it got worn a couple of times and then used for painting until it wore out.
- scrumper 5y ago
  Nice that their legacy lives on, thrives really, in GIFs.
xg15 5y ago
This could be solved today with a short application to the Unicode consortium and a few OS updates, so I guess we made progress :)
- Tijdreiziger 5y ago
  Well, no -- that's discussed in the article: > Parker Higgins investigated whether Prince could be honored in unicode with this symbol. (Answer – no, on three counts, as it’s personal, a logo, and protected intellectual property.)
- rectang 5y ago
  From the article: > Parker Higgins investigated whether Prince could be honored in unicode with this symbol. (Answer – no, on three counts, as it’s personal, a logo, and protected intellectual property.)
  - xg15 5y ago
    Argh, I'm sorry. And that's why one should always read the article fully before commenting...
  - ajb 5y ago
    Apparently some fans proposed a combining-character representation though: http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML019/0611.html http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML... Ƭ̵̬̊
- rsynnott 5y ago
  The Unicode consortium is generally quite resistant to this sort of thing; I think you'd probably have to establish more use than just "one person uses this as a name". Notoriously, they won't even allow Klingon.
  - revolvingocelot 5y ago
    >Notoriously, they won't even allow Klingon. I can't resist, gotta agitate about this. Unicode allocated space for the legendarily-untranslated Minoan script Linear A, for fuck's sake! Unicode allocated space for fucking Ogham script -- not that that's inappropriate, but it's unlikely to be used by the vast majority of people, now or in future, simply as a consequence of its antiquity and obsolescence. Of course I'm revealing my 90s-trek power level here, but it's seriously puzzling (shading all the way up into quietly infuriating) that these dead languages' scripts are welcomed, while an, er, conlang that has actual living speakers can't have any of the frankly voluminous Unicodespace. QI'yaH!
1-more 5y ago
Limor Fried continues to be a hero.
- uncletammy 5y ago
  I came across Limor's Minty MP3 player when I was young, broke, and looking for an open alternative to an ipod. It was back before Adafruit existed as a web store. Minty was just an open PCB design hosted on a single page with a parts list and a link to a forum where people would help each other source parts and assemble the thing. I have very fond memories of this because it changed the trajectory of my life. It showed me how powerful a tool the internet could be for organizing people around ideas, many of which sought to improve people's lives through free and open technology. The other thing this experience did was to make me feel safe tinkering with hardware and electronic circuits. Consumer devices had felt like mystical black boxes that could never be understood, much less re-created by me. After Minty, I was empowered to take things apart and learn how they worked. I grew an appetite for technical knowledge that hasn't slowed down to this day. EDIT: Found a capture. It's slightly different than I remember it but it's a nice little snapshot of Adafruit's origin story. https://web.archive.org/web/20050215023236/http://web.media.mit.edu/~ladyada/make/minty/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050215023236/http://web.media....
chriscjcj 5y ago
If it was part of a font, then I would think that the logo was in vector form. (It could have been a bitmap font, of course, but if you're sending the font to magazines and publishers, a postscript or TueType font would have been more appropriate.) If it did exist in the font as a vector based image, it seems strange to upload a rasterized version to archive.org. It wouldn't have been too hard to upload it as an svg or eps and maintain its quality regardless of its size/resolution.
- pavon 5y ago
  The article says the Mac version was a bmapfile which is a rasterized image format, not vector form. That said, they really should have uploaded the original files to archive.org, in addition to the conversion to a more common format.
mmastrac 5y ago
Not snarky at all, but this would be great as an SVG - which could then be turned into a proper TTF using the private-use area. EDIT: seems to be available as a TTF here (but apparently under 'S' rather than 'P'): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jvj2ss4jfymvir1/AADXW3RWGwgykj1mgsInvCRBa?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jvj2ss4jfymvir1/AADXW3RWGwgykj1mg...
notpachet 5y ago
Prince's struggles with Warner bore other wonderful fruit, as well. Emancipation, Prince's first album after casting off the metaphorical shackles of Warner, is a superb album. It has 36 songs and spans 180 minutes, to give you a sense of the amount of artistic freedom that Prince must have been feeling at the time. Highly recommended listening for any casual Prince fan who wants to expand their knowledge of his repertoire. The man was an unqualified musical genius.
- e40 5y ago
  He was also way ahead of the curve connecting directly with fans. He had a BBS/forum/something that a friend of mine who was a huge Prince fan was a member of. As a member, they got early access to new tracks. I don't remember how much it was, but my friend loved it.
  - Wingman4l7 5y ago
    David Bowie was a pioneer in this space as well -- he had his own ISP, BowieNet: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/david-bowie-bowienet-isp-internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/david-bow...
- elb2020 5y ago
  I personally like his stuff from before Diamonds and Pearls, mostly. After that I think he got further and further removed from his original funk roots, and I think he sort of drifted off into a sea of wishy-washy new age stuff that he never fully re-emerged from. I know his later stuff will, still, be endorsed by hardcore fans, but I do not think it's for the casual listener.
ok123456 5y ago
This was around the time Prince was sending out cease and disease letters to people hosting Prince midi files.
Stampo00 5y ago
The title is a bit hyperbolic. Although it's cool to secure an original diskette and read it, archived versions were already available online.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jareklupinski 5y ago
  yea I wish they went into a bit more detail on _how_ they extracted it, so the next person who needs to dump an unarchived floppy can follow their steps
  - anildash 5y ago
    Will do, haven’t had a chance to write that up fully yet!
dr-detroit 5y ago
Some muppet will give you a million dollar if you say its an NFT
ComputerGuru 5y ago
After all that, they uploaded it to the archive as an image rather than as a font or vector file!?
dhosek 5y ago
Part of the dispute Prince was having with the label continues to this day and is why Taylor Swift has re-recorded all her albums. It is "standard practice" for the label to take ownership of the copyright on the recorded material (called phonographic copyright and indicated with ℗) while charging all the costs of recording against the artist's share of the royalties which can result in an artist owing the label money for a hit record. Ray Charles was a pioneer in insisting that he own the phonographic copyright on his recordings when he moved from Atlantic to ABC-Paramount yet this remained something out of reach for most artists. Robert Fripp was engaged in a decades-long lawsuit against EG to regain control of the phonographic copyright on King Crimson material (as well as to recoup illegally withheld royalties). Squeeze is another artist who re-recorded their albums to reclaim the phonographic copyright. It's worth noting that Warner Brothers' response to Swift re-recording her albums was to update their contracts to prevent any other artist from following in her footsteps.
- phkahler 5y ago
  "Oh, you need to sign over the copyright to us so we can legally make and distribute copies." I think that's approximately the line of bullshit they give. No, by default creators own their copyright and can license that on terms they allow. Once you sign that over it's just not your material anymore.
  - paljasma 5y ago
    That's what Daft Punk did in 1997: "The deal they struck with Virgin at the outset of their career - essentially licensing music to Virgin from their own company, Daft Trax - was pioneering." [0] [0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/48f880e8-d8b3-4e4f-9fa3-3005ae0910a2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/48f880e8-d8b3-4e4f-9fa3...
- gonehome 5y ago
  In the old world the business model made sense, it no longer does. Part of what gets distorted by Taylor Swift and Dave Chappelle is the larger context. Similar to VC the vast majority of label supported musicians are economic failures. The big winners pay for the rest of the failures. With modern distribution this is mostly a bad deal. Since the 'Non Fungible Taylor Swift' [0] is really in control she can subvert this (until contracts get updated), but generally people can just go direct now and do their own marketing or negotiate better terms for investment. I'm not fan of the music labels or how their clinging to an outdated business model for decades has set back their market cap by probably billions (compare to free to play videogames), but the way this is often portrayed by the rare breakout artists is similarly warped and one-sided. You never hear from the failures the label funded that didn't make it. [0]: https://stratechery.com/2021/non-fungible-taylor-swift/ https://stratechery.com/2021/non-fungible-taylor-swift/
SavantIdiot 5y ago
This article grossly understates how much Anil Dash adores Prince! Anyone who's followed Anil knows it goes quite deep.
marcodiego 5y ago
Hmmm... Prince, not Prince of Persia.
linsomniac 5y ago
Prince's name change reminds me of that Bit of Fry and Laurie police station sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA
pvaldes 5y ago
Losing it would be a minor problem, when could had been redone easily in metafont from any of the millions of singles of the most beautiful girl in the world available. We have a scientific symbol yet for the representation of both sexes, hermaphrodyte. Is in unicode yet (if I'm not wrong) so there is not a real need to use this. Would start a war for every artist and band in the planet asking for their personal symbol in unicode. Rolling stones tongue should be for example. Is as much iconic than the trumpet key, if not more.
habitue 5y ago
I guess add one more falsehood programmers believe about names: - People's names aren't a non-unicode symbol that a person made up just to refer to themselves
Anthony-G 5y ago
According to the linked biography¹ > The label was reportedly after control of Prince's master tapes. Edit: I’m guessing this refers to owning the right to copy a master rather than owning the physical tapes that the master is stored on. Relevant quote from a 1996 NY Times article on Prince² > If you don't own your masters, your master owns you. When Prince changed his name to a symbol, I didn’t pay too much attention to pop or mainstream music so when I heard about it, I had assumed he was simply being pretentious. After hearing about his problems with Warner Brothers, I have a lot more sympathy for his actions and desire to have creative control over his own music. ¹ https://www.angelfire.com/wv/Royalbadness/bio.html https://www.angelfire.com/wv/Royalbadness/bio.html ² https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/17/arts/a-re-inventor-of-his-world-and-himself.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/17/arts/a-re-inventor-of-his...

232 points by glitcher 5y ago

teajunky 5y ago

The name doesn't matter to me. I would like to hear these five hundred songs

bob332 5y ago

Lol sex is binary, anyone who thinks otherwise is utterly delusional

jonplackett 5y ago

CompuServe. That's a name I forgot I used to know so well!

AutumnCurtain 5y ago
I still have a freebie shirt they gave me in like 1994. Who knew it would outlast them
- fullstop 5y ago
  I have a Sun Microsystems shirt from the same era. It still fits!
  - mnw21cam 5y ago
    I was given a Sun t-shirt that had been compressed into a surfboard shape at a conference. Unfortunately they gave me a size that could probably have fitted three of me in, so it got worn a couple of times and then used for painting until it wore out.
scrumper 5y ago
Nice that their legacy lives on, thrives really, in GIFs.

xg15 5y ago

This could be solved today with a short application to the Unicode consortium and a few OS updates, so I guess we made progress :)

Tijdreiziger 5y ago
Well, no -- that's discussed in the article: > Parker Higgins investigated whether Prince could be honored in unicode with this symbol. (Answer – no, on three counts, as it’s personal, a logo, and protected intellectual property.)
rectang 5y ago
From the article: > Parker Higgins investigated whether Prince could be honored in unicode with this symbol. (Answer – no, on three counts, as it’s personal, a logo, and protected intellectual property.)
- xg15 5y ago
  Argh, I'm sorry. And that's why one should always read the article fully before commenting...
- ajb 5y ago
  Apparently some fans proposed a combining-character representation though: http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML019/0611.html http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML... Ƭ̵̬̊
rsynnott 5y ago
The Unicode consortium is generally quite resistant to this sort of thing; I think you'd probably have to establish more use than just "one person uses this as a name". Notoriously, they won't even allow Klingon.
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  >Notoriously, they won't even allow Klingon. I can't resist, gotta agitate about this. Unicode allocated space for the legendarily-untranslated Minoan script Linear A, for fuck's sake! Unicode allocated space for fucking Ogham script -- not that that's inappropriate, but it's unlikely to be used by the vast majority of people, now or in future, simply as a consequence of its antiquity and obsolescence. Of course I'm revealing my 90s-trek power level here, but it's seriously puzzling (shading all the way up into quietly infuriating) that these dead languages' scripts are welcomed, while an, er, conlang that has actual living speakers can't have any of the frankly voluminous Unicodespace. QI'yaH!

1-more 5y ago

Limor Fried continues to be a hero.

uncletammy 5y ago
I came across Limor's Minty MP3 player when I was young, broke, and looking for an open alternative to an ipod. It was back before Adafruit existed as a web store. Minty was just an open PCB design hosted on a single page with a parts list and a link to a forum where people would help each other source parts and assemble the thing. I have very fond memories of this because it changed the trajectory of my life. It showed me how powerful a tool the internet could be for organizing people around ideas, many of which sought to improve people's lives through free and open technology. The other thing this experience did was to make me feel safe tinkering with hardware and electronic circuits. Consumer devices had felt like mystical black boxes that could never be understood, much less re-created by me. After Minty, I was empowered to take things apart and learn how they worked. I grew an appetite for technical knowledge that hasn't slowed down to this day. EDIT: Found a capture. It's slightly different than I remember it but it's a nice little snapshot of Adafruit's origin story. https://web.archive.org/web/20050215023236/http://web.media.mit.edu/~ladyada/make/minty/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050215023236/http://web.media....

chriscjcj 5y ago

If it was part of a font, then I would think that the logo was in vector form. (It could have been a bitmap font, of course, but if you're sending the font to magazines and publishers, a postscript or TueType font would have been more appropriate.) If it did exist in the font as a vector based image, it seems strange to upload a rasterized version to archive.org. It wouldn't have been too hard to upload it as an svg or eps and maintain its quality regardless of its size/resolution.

pavon 5y ago
The article says the Mac version was a bmapfile which is a rasterized image format, not vector form. That said, they really should have uploaded the original files to archive.org, in addition to the conversion to a more common format.

mmastrac 5y ago

Not snarky at all, but this would be great as an SVG - which could then be turned into a proper TTF using the private-use area. EDIT: seems to be available as a TTF here (but apparently under 'S' rather than 'P'): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jvj2ss4jfymvir1/AADXW3RWGwgykj1mgsInvCRBa?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jvj2ss4jfymvir1/AADXW3RWGwgykj1mg...

notpachet 5y ago

Prince's struggles with Warner bore other wonderful fruit, as well. Emancipation, Prince's first album after casting off the metaphorical shackles of Warner, is a superb album. It has 36 songs and spans 180 minutes, to give you a sense of the amount of artistic freedom that Prince must have been feeling at the time. Highly recommended listening for any casual Prince fan who wants to expand their knowledge of his repertoire. The man was an unqualified musical genius.

e40 5y ago
He was also way ahead of the curve connecting directly with fans. He had a BBS/forum/something that a friend of mine who was a huge Prince fan was a member of. As a member, they got early access to new tracks. I don't remember how much it was, but my friend loved it.
- Wingman4l7 5y ago
  David Bowie was a pioneer in this space as well -- he had his own ISP, BowieNet: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/david-bowie-bowienet-isp-internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/david-bow...
elb2020 5y ago
I personally like his stuff from before Diamonds and Pearls, mostly. After that I think he got further and further removed from his original funk roots, and I think he sort of drifted off into a sea of wishy-washy new age stuff that he never fully re-emerged from. I know his later stuff will, still, be endorsed by hardcore fans, but I do not think it's for the casual listener.

ok123456 5y ago

This was around the time Prince was sending out cease and disease letters to people hosting Prince midi files.

Stampo00 5y ago

The title is a bit hyperbolic. Although it's cool to secure an original diskette and read it, archived versions were already available online.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jareklupinski 5y ago
yea I wish they went into a bit more detail on _how_ they extracted it, so the next person who needs to dump an unarchived floppy can follow their steps
- anildash 5y ago
  Will do, haven’t had a chance to write that up fully yet!

dr-detroit 5y ago

Some muppet will give you a million dollar if you say its an NFT

ComputerGuru 5y ago

After all that, they uploaded it to the archive as an image rather than as a font or vector file!?

dhosek 5y ago

Part of the dispute Prince was having with the label continues to this day and is why Taylor Swift has re-recorded all her albums. It is "standard practice" for the label to take ownership of the copyright on the recorded material (called phonographic copyright and indicated with ℗) while charging all the costs of recording against the artist's share of the royalties which can result in an artist owing the label money for a hit record. Ray Charles was a pioneer in insisting that he own the phonographic copyright on his recordings when he moved from Atlantic to ABC-Paramount yet this remained something out of reach for most artists. Robert Fripp was engaged in a decades-long lawsuit against EG to regain control of the phonographic copyright on King Crimson material (as well as to recoup illegally withheld royalties). Squeeze is another artist who re-recorded their albums to reclaim the phonographic copyright. It's worth noting that Warner Brothers' response to Swift re-recording her albums was to update their contracts to prevent any other artist from following in her footsteps.

phkahler 5y ago
"Oh, you need to sign over the copyright to us so we can legally make and distribute copies." I think that's approximately the line of bullshit they give. No, by default creators own their copyright and can license that on terms they allow. Once you sign that over it's just not your material anymore.
- paljasma 5y ago
  That's what Daft Punk did in 1997: "The deal they struck with Virgin at the outset of their career - essentially licensing music to Virgin from their own company, Daft Trax - was pioneering." [0] [0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/48f880e8-d8b3-4e4f-9fa3-3005ae0910a2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/48f880e8-d8b3-4e4f-9fa3...
gonehome 5y ago
In the old world the business model made sense, it no longer does. Part of what gets distorted by Taylor Swift and Dave Chappelle is the larger context. Similar to VC the vast majority of label supported musicians are economic failures. The big winners pay for the rest of the failures. With modern distribution this is mostly a bad deal. Since the 'Non Fungible Taylor Swift' [0] is really in control she can subvert this (until contracts get updated), but generally people can just go direct now and do their own marketing or negotiate better terms for investment. I'm not fan of the music labels or how their clinging to an outdated business model for decades has set back their market cap by probably billions (compare to free to play videogames), but the way this is often portrayed by the rare breakout artists is similarly warped and one-sided. You never hear from the failures the label funded that didn't make it. [0]: https://stratechery.com/2021/non-fungible-taylor-swift/ https://stratechery.com/2021/non-fungible-taylor-swift/

SavantIdiot 5y ago

This article grossly understates how much Anil Dash adores Prince! Anyone who's followed Anil knows it goes quite deep.

marcodiego 5y ago

Hmmm... Prince, not Prince of Persia.

linsomniac 5y ago

Prince's name change reminds me of that Bit of Fry and Laurie police station sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA

pvaldes 5y ago

Losing it would be a minor problem, when could had been redone easily in metafont from any of the millions of singles of the most beautiful girl in the world available. We have a scientific symbol yet for the representation of both sexes, hermaphrodyte. Is in unicode yet (if I'm not wrong) so there is not a real need to use this. Would start a war for every artist and band in the planet asking for their personal symbol in unicode. Rolling stones tongue should be for example. Is as much iconic than the trumpet key, if not more.

habitue 5y ago

I guess add one more falsehood programmers believe about names: - People's names aren't a non-unicode symbol that a person made up just to refer to themselves

Anthony-G 5y ago

According to the linked biography¹ > The label was reportedly after control of Prince's master tapes. Edit: I’m guessing this refers to owning the right to copy a master rather than owning the physical tapes that the master is stored on. Relevant quote from a 1996 NY Times article on Prince² > If you don't own your masters, your master owns you. When Prince changed his name to a symbol, I didn’t pay too much attention to pop or mainstream music so when I heard about it, I had assumed he was simply being pretentious. After hearing about his problems with Warner Brothers, I have a lot more sympathy for his actions and desire to have creative control over his own music. ¹ https://www.angelfire.com/wv/Royalbadness/bio.html https://www.angelfire.com/wv/Royalbadness/bio.html ² https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/17/arts/a-re-inventor-of-his-world-and-himself.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/17/arts/a-re-inventor-of-his...