Live Free or Die: The Origins of the Geek License Plate

Long before the Silicon Valley elite flaunted their Audis, there was a far more refined Silicon Valley status symbol: the geek license plate. Visit Google or Apple’s parking lot, and you’ll see them sprinkled throughout: FSCK; HTTP418, RM-RF*. Bucks of Woodside — the quirky Valley restaurant that’s been home to deals and dreams for more […]
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Karen Shannon in 1980 with the original Live Free or Die Unix license plate.Photo: Bill Shannon

Long before the Silicon Valley elite flaunted their Audis, there was a far more refined Silicon Valley status symbol: the geek license plate.

Visit Google or Apple's parking lot, and you'll see them sprinkled throughout: FSCK; HTTP418, RM-RF*. Bucks of Woodside -- the quirky Valley restaurant that's been home to deals and dreams for more than 20 years -- has a framed Google license plate on the wall. Beneath it there's the caption: "I was too dumb to buy the stock, but I bought the plate."

But who was first? Who sported the first geek license plate?

We think it was Peter G. Weiner.

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Right around the time that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were cooking up Apple Computer, Weiner started up a computer company of his own, eventually known as Interactive Systems Corp. While Jobs and Woz wanted to sell low-cost computers to enthusiasts, Weiner set his sights higher. He was the first person to sell Unix systems to corporations -- often at hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop.

The year was 1976. Vanity license plates had been available in California for just six years, but Weiner decided it was time for him to get one for his family Peugeot. "Having just started the first Unix company, I suppose it made a certain amount of sense," he says.

And the geek license plate was born.

In true Unix fashion, Weiner gave his plate away a few years later to Ted Dolotta, a Unix guru he'd just hired to work for his company. Years later, Dolotta sold his plate at a charity auction for $6,000.

By then, he'd inspired another Unix geek -- a guy named Bill Shannon, who was working for the just-formed Unix business unit at Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) -- and Shannon's New Hampshire "Live Free or Die" Unix license plate has become not only a geek icon, but a rallying cry for people who related to the source-code-sharing ideas that helped Unix spread.

"It matched our passion for Unix," says Shannon, now a software architect at Oracle. "The people doing Unix at the time were very passionate about it."

Shannon gave up his Unix plate in 1982, when he moved to Silicon Valley to work at a startup called Sun Microsystems. The New Hampshire Unix plate is now owned by Jon 'Maddog' Hall, a former DEC Unix head who is the president of Linux International.

In the 1980s, DEC started handing out novelty versions of the Unix "Live Free or Die" plate. The plate was actually a geek joke. "In those days, in order to get a license to run Unix (even BSD), you had to first negotiate with AT&T and get an AT&T license," Hall remembered in a written history of the plate he shared with Wired. "Then, having that license in hand, you had to go actually get the bits, which might mean more licensing and money."

DEC's Armando P. Stettner started giving the plates away as a joke to customers who asked him for a DEC Unix license.

Several thousand have been given out in the decades since. You can still see them in many geek cubes, but a ride down Silicon Valley's Highway 101 shows that they've also inspired a lot of imitators.

Vanity license plates are by no means the exclusive domain of geeks. They've been around since Connecticut introduced them in 1937 as a perk for drivers with five years of accident-free driving under their belts, says Jeff Minard, a researcher with the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association.

Minard doesn't know offhand about any geek license plates that are older than Weiner's, but he says that there's a pretty good chance that someone is cruising around Boston with an older geek plate. Massachusetts, after all, has a long and storied computer history. And it introduced vanity plates 13 years ahead of California, starting in 1957: the year DEC was founded.

Roger White, associate curator of road transportation at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History has just four vanity plates in his collection, and none of them is computer-related. He says that for a vanity plate to be museum-worthy, it needs to come with a story from its original owner, be interesting, and -- most importantly -- be easy to understand.

That would immediately disqualify some of the very best plates that we've found.

Pretty much anyone who is obsessive about a subject is a potential vanity plate owner. But they tend to have other character traits too, according to Dennis Cowhey, the author of What Does That Mean? The Personal Stories Behind Vanity License Plates. "Plate owners tend to be prosperous, outgoing ... and a little bit full of themselves, he says "Everybody's got something to say," he explains. "They're all trying to tell their story to people."