In the spring of 2021 I stumbled upon this hacker news page.
It wasn't the first time in my life I saw the Unix Magic poster, I encountered it before a couple of times, online and in real life, in a waiting room for a job interview (that I ended up not accepting it, but that's a story for another time). I always admired it and thought about hanging a copy of some sort on the wall near my desk but I never got around it.
This time was different though, I wanted to finally have it.
It wasn't a good period in my life, well in fact it was a horrible period since I had broken up with my girlfriends after 16 years together and I had just moved out of our home.
I was also coming from a tough time at my job, I had worked a lot of overtime in the prior 4 months due to a big bank acquisition and I had a fat bonus on my hands (at least for my company standards).
So I said to myself "fuck it, this time I'm gonna buy the original".
I started looking for ways to contact the original author, Gary Overacre. If I remember correctly I found the son's e-mail in a YouTube comment, I wrote to him and got in touch with Gary's wife, Jeanne.
After a cross-check via e-mail thanks to other people who got in touch with the Overacre (I didn't want to send my money to someone who would pose as them) I asked if they still had a copy of the poster and if they were willing to shipping to Italy.
Please note it's a 1986 poster made for a company named UNITECH that commissioned it to Gary Overacre as promo material for their conferences. It's part of a trio, together with Unix Feuds and Unix Views. They were never reprinted.
There were some people online willing to sell it (I remember finding some ended eBay auctions and a tweet from a guy that wanted flipping all three of them) but it usually is not in pristine conditions as it is commonly hanged somewhere with pins or adhesive tape without any kind of protections.
The Overacre still had some pristine original copies and they would send me a signed one for 250$ + shipping.
Let me say that they are exquisite people: extremely kind and friendly. They didn't want any money upfront (something rather unique) and after I received the first cylinder box shipped with the very slow USPS + Italian Post I sadly discovered the poster was damaged and... they didn't wanted any money! And believe me, I insisted since it wasn't fair at all.
The first poster wasn't completely ruined but I told myself "this is not something I'm going to buy another time in the future, it's now or never" so I asked them it were possible to ship another copy with UPS or some other express courier and after some scouting (thanks Jeanne) they did! In only three day I received my pristine signed copy of the Unix poster.
Together with a letter from Gary from the first shipment I was now owning a little treasure!
I found an agreement with the Overacre on the money to send to them, since they paid for 2 shipping and sent me 2 posters and I quickly had it framed. Together with the PayPal commissions and the custom fees I ended up spending a lot, but it was a one-time acquisition that I'm sure I'll keep and enjoy it for life, since the portrayed scene is timeless.
I won't go in the details of all the UNIX references represented in the poster since you can find a comprehensive list on the hacker news page linked at the beginning of this post.
I can spot a bunch of references myself each time I observe it and it's always nice to look at it together with people that see it for the first time and to see them discover progressively many of the tech references hidden in plain view.
#geek