Wednesday 19 March 2014

Apple Logo

George Osborne has announced in his Budget speech that the Government will provide £42m to found the 'Alan Turing Institute' which will focus on the use of big data and algorithm research.
Nice to see Alan Turing getting a mention, especially how atrociously he was treated by his own Government during his lifetime.
I had always assumed that the Apple logo was a nod towards computer pioneer Alan Turing who faced jail for homosexual acts, took his own life by biting into an apple he had laced with cyanide.
A computer firm with a logo of a apple with a bite taken out of always made perfect sense to me but it turned out that the Apple logo was in tribute to someone famous, just not the obvious one.
The first Apple logo was of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree with an apple dangling above him and over time they simplified it to just the Apple logo with a bite taken out of it so it wasn't mistaken for a cherry.
The Apple name rather boringly came from Steve Jobs visiting an Apple farm in the early days when he was just starting up the company.
While not wishing to relegate Isaac Newtons achievements, the Turing idea was much more poetic and fitting for a computer company. I will file it in 'things i wished i hadn't found out' along with raspberry flavouring comes from beavers backsides, the red smarties are made from crushed beetles and Hotel California is just a rip off of a Jethro Tull song.

2 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lucy said...

I thought because of him being a well known computer pioneer more than a man who killed himself.