Talk:Power Macintosh 7100

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Sagan/BHA/LAW?

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Are there sources that say definitively that BHA means "Butt-head astronomer", and "LAW" means "Lawyers Are Wimps"? Or was this leaked out and rumored? If (as I believe) the truth is the latter, then we shouldn't be so definitive in the article about the meanings of the acronyms (e.g. "purportedly", "rumored to be"). -- 75.144.159.89 (talk) 16:07, 8 April 2011 (UTC)Reply

That "BHA" did mean "Butt Head Astronomer" among Apple coders was the entire raison d'etre of Sagan's lawsuit, and dryly reported as such by Time, inter alia, along with the famous reference of the judge: "one does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase ‘butt-head’." (ibid.). The thing started with Sagan contemporaneously determining as a fact that BHA meant the phrase; it didn't mysteriously appear after, in Apple employee acronym jargon, as a replacement. As for "LAW", it appears matter-of-factly after "BHA" in online copies of the 7100 spec sheets, along with Gestalt ID number and other incredibly boring and uncontroversial tidbits. Its connection with the phrase comes as early as the year of the suit itself, and is also noted almost equally matter-of-factly, eg. Owen W. Linzmayer, The Mac Bathroom Reader,1994:

"They settled on LAW, which stands for Lawyers Are Wimps. Nonetheless, in the third week of April 1994, Sagan sued Apple..." p.243. [Google Books]

To get any better documentation about these things, we'd have to examine the court records, but as far as I'm concerned the matter is established. JohndanR (talk) 19:42, 2 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

I seem to remember that the lawsuit was actually not about Sagan seeming to endorse the product, but rather that the code names of the other two initial PowerPC machines (the 6100 and 8100) were "Piltdown Man" and "Cold Fusion"—notorious scientific frauds. Sagan supposedly objected to the implication that he himself was a fraud. But I don't have any citations for that. Jerry Kindall (talk) 02:25, 22 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

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