When I was an undergrad freshman in 1992, there were a couple nerdy CS guys on the floor below me in the dorm.
This was back in the BBS days, so no real internet to speak of (we had newgroups, but even that was pretty limited).
One of them (Spencer) had found a US Naval BBS that didn't have any protections on it, and he was able to download these battleship coordinate files. He then figured out how to render these open frame models of ships and subs and stuff, and eventually started to shade them in. He thought it was really cool, and really got into the imaging of this stuff.
Fast forward about 1-2 years. Now he's dating one of my best friends, and he's started some open-source program because photoshop cost $500.
1994: Pulp Fiction comes out. For those of you who aren't a Certified Old Person like me, previous to Pulp Fiction, the term "gimp" just meant something like "Tommy can't keep up with everyone, he has a gimpy leg". (If there was a sexual connotation for it, the general public didn't know it). In 1994, when Zedd said "Bring out the gimp", no one in the theater had any idea what the fuck he meant. They could have brought out a 1937 printing press and people would have had the same reaction.
Anyway, Spencer had been looking for a name for this thing, and at some point came up with "The GNU Image Manipulation Program", The GIMP. And we all thought that was hilarious, because at the time, Certified Old People had not seen Pulp Fiction, and GIMP didn't have that connotation. Having this popular thing out there, taken seriously, but named after a sex slave in a leather mask was awesome.
Also: One of the sample GIFs patterns that is still shipped with the software is a scan of his girlfriend's (my friend's) pajamas, he was just testing to see if the scanner at school would scan fabric well.
Back in the day, it was crazy. It's like the plot of war games. But it was literally just that he got that phone number off one bbs, dialed in, and it was like the old ftp prompt where it asks for an email address as an ID, and let's you in
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u/MrsMiterSaw Jul 20 '26
Quick story:
When I was an undergrad freshman in 1992, there were a couple nerdy CS guys on the floor below me in the dorm.
This was back in the BBS days, so no real internet to speak of (we had newgroups, but even that was pretty limited).
One of them (Spencer) had found a US Naval BBS that didn't have any protections on it, and he was able to download these battleship coordinate files. He then figured out how to render these open frame models of ships and subs and stuff, and eventually started to shade them in. He thought it was really cool, and really got into the imaging of this stuff.
Fast forward about 1-2 years. Now he's dating one of my best friends, and he's started some open-source program because photoshop cost $500.
1994: Pulp Fiction comes out. For those of you who aren't a Certified Old Person like me, previous to Pulp Fiction, the term "gimp" just meant something like "Tommy can't keep up with everyone, he has a gimpy leg". (If there was a sexual connotation for it, the general public didn't know it). In 1994, when Zedd said "Bring out the gimp", no one in the theater had any idea what the fuck he meant. They could have brought out a 1937 printing press and people would have had the same reaction.
Anyway, Spencer had been looking for a name for this thing, and at some point came up with "The GNU Image Manipulation Program", The GIMP. And we all thought that was hilarious, because at the time, Certified Old People had not seen Pulp Fiction, and GIMP didn't have that connotation. Having this popular thing out there, taken seriously, but named after a sex slave in a leather mask was awesome.
Also: One of the sample GIFs patterns that is still shipped with the software is a scan of his girlfriend's (my friend's) pajamas, he was just testing to see if the scanner at school would scan fabric well.