Here's the story.

Thanks to an initiative by Tony Conway, the Glasgow HEP Group had been running one or other version of the VM operating system, on whichever IBM mainframe it happened to have at the time, for quite a number of years. We were active in SHARE Europe?- an independent user group of IBM users?- and on the electronic conference of users of the VM operating system called VMSHARE.

History records that in 1983 the USA SHARE VM Project was looking for a symbol by which VM users could identify each other at conferences, and chose the teddy bear. Within hours, the teddy bear symbol became the accepted symbol for the warm and cuddly (by system programmer and system management standards) operating system, VM.

The USA SHARE VM Project had a nice custom of making a short list of people who they felt had made a useful contribution to the VM community, and enrolling them in their Order of the Knights of VM. In 1992 I was astonished to be informed that I had been chosen to join this select band of folk, and at the subsequent conference of SHARE Europe I was called forward to receive my scroll and official teddy bear.