Year seems to fit... !
Hmm embed doesn't work atm. https://badspot.us/Brown-Ring-of-Quality.html
Just a few months after the comic was originally published, Lucent Technologies, a spin-off of the supposedly-fragmented AT&T, changed their logo to something resembling a Brown Ring of Quality.
The logo is actually called the "Innovation Ring". That is not a joke.
That's actually incorrect, the brown ring was making fun of the innovation ring because it was such a sloppy logo.
...although it could be that the logo wasn't released to the general public until September. I can't remember tbh, it's been too long. Perhaps because I can remember parts of the 90s I wasn't there?
Yep. Fun times, I was there for it.