I'm glad it failed to trademark. Autodesk is one of the worst corpo's around when it comes to being corpo. How un self-aware for them to make that 'street' joke. They were like a 100+ million company back then.
https://uspto.report/TM/73816876
And yeah, Autodesk was hardly a tiny startup. Its market cap at the end of 1989 was about $945 million.
But the "street" line was a deliberately smartass quotation from Gibson in a letter I wrote, not some corporate attempt to pass itself off as counterculture. Gibson subsequently had the better rejoinder: "Autodesk is not the street."
Judging the Autodesk Research Lab of 1989 by the reputation of the company Autodesk later became seems rather ahistorical. Even founder John Walker had already declared himself "Bored (sic) of Directors" by 1988:
Autodesk tried to trademark a phrase recently invented by an author. They would have had to defend it too. Would they have sued Gibson? Ahistorical my ass
Honestly I don't understand how it was accepted? Obviously Gibson invented it?
Perhaps not, but it was sent on Autodesk company letterhead...
I'd go one step further on Gibsons' statement that the street find its own uses for things, and state that everything starts on the street before it becomes corporate, and then it returns to the street, eventually ...
Autodesk was quite alright back then.