20 years ago, programming skills and access to Anime in Europe were highly correlated.
Back then, me and friends spent an insane amount of time on reverse engineering a Japanese file sharing app so that we could build our own server version (like Deluge nowadays) and then we built our own IRC server and our own XDCC download bots so that we could get Anime raws onto a university server and then recode them to make download over ISDN (64kb/s) feasible.
Also, a lot of the Animes featured socially awkward nerd guys who by accident stumbled into their own harem...
With that context, posters of Anime girls together with nerd stuff sold extremely well at Connichi (a big Anime convention in Germany). A friend of mine (who's now CTO of a C++ dev shop) even bought a wax printer so that we could make really high quality A3 posters.
So I guess it's an in-joke for Europeans born in the 80s.
Back then, me and friends spent an insane amount of time on reverse engineering a Japanese file sharing app so that we could build our own server version (like Deluge nowadays) and then we built our own IRC server and our own XDCC download bots so that we could get Anime raws onto a university server and then recode them to make download over ISDN (64kb/s) feasible.
Also, a lot of the Animes featured socially awkward nerd guys who by accident stumbled into their own harem...
With that context, posters of Anime girls together with nerd stuff sold extremely well at Connichi (a big Anime convention in Germany). A friend of mine (who's now CTO of a C++ dev shop) even bought a wax printer so that we could make really high quality A3 posters.
So I guess it's an in-joke for Europeans born in the 80s.