Alan Bedenko posted this photo in his Flickr stream, and I had to post it here. Obviously it’s a big cheese sitting inside some kind of cutting tool, which I at first wondered if it was some kind of antique miter saw…but Alan points out that it’s actually a tool once manufactured for the purpose of cutting Gouda cheese. And it was made by IBM, believe it or not! If you click through to the big version, you can see “International Business Machines” engraved on that nameplate.
Who knew that IBM was once making food service tools? And I wonder what Apple’s cheese-cutting implements looked like?
No doubt the Apple variant of this was very sleek, minimalist, and modernistic in a way that its fans praised as the second coming of Great Design, while its detractors denounced it as alienating in its sterility.