Remember all the hassle IBM gave the latest company to show up brandishing IBM’s nickname, tiny Northport, New York-based Big Blue Products Inc? IBM wrote to the company asserting that Big Blue is a trade mark of the IBM Corporation – only trouble is, it ain’t: turns out that while fabricating 4M-bit memories on thumbnail-sized slivers of silicon is a breeze for IBM, and the company is no slouch at building some of the most powerful mainframes in the world, the Armonkeys are all fingers and thumbs when it comes to more mundane matters like filling in a trade mark application form for the US Patent & Trademark Office, and because it forgot to date its first attempt, and forgot to sign the second one, that Big Blue trademark is still pending.
