The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great
27 comments
·April 22, 2025danielvf
WillAdams
Yeah, apparently the warehouse which made this workable was in Kingston, Tenn. adjacent to the FedEx Hub, so things could go straight to the plane which was taking them to the FedEx distributor closest to the delivery address.
Still have the Wacom ArtZ I bought from them in the wee hours of a Monday morning when I decided I desperately had to have one.
4ggr0
I'd love to have a poster of the picture in the "PC Preppy" advert from October 1984[0]. I wonder how I could aquire the highest resolution possible...
Love raccoons <3
[0] https://d1pkj6r18lfvhs.archive.is/BxyNA/d05003d20de92f868e5b...
csours
Artist website: https://www.erickingraham.com/
sgt
I asked ChatGPT to imagine pretty much the same scene as that top drawing. It's such a great example of LLM's - having zero understanding of the real world - has the racoons looking at the computer but from behind it.
https://sdmntprwestus.oaiusercontent.com/files/00000000-c810...
CursedSilicon
They look so dead eyed and bland, too. AI "art" just makes me sad.
There's so many furry artists out there, just pay one of them to draw raccoons and computers. You'll get something created with love and beauty that expresses something real
hhh
missing the entire point of the article award
Dylan16807
Did you read the whole comment? I need you to explain why you think that.
BambooBandit
"The point of the characters, it said, was to add 'a human touch to high tech.'"
Something we need today, too
ChrisMarshallNY
It's kind of odd, seeing the MicroWarehouse Girl.
I very much remember her, smiling out from many different magazines.
cm2012
I absolutely adore this article on computer ad history.
mjevans
Might be hugged to death, no current copies on archive.org or archive.today :(
KTibow
Archived now: https://archive.is/BxyNA
snozolli
It eventually loaded for me, which was a surprise.
fullshark
Feeling cognitive dissonance given this is making me feel nostalgic for advertising.
ars
It's because they are simply advertising a product. It's the "lifestyle" ads that people hate so much.
mamcx
True, before was cool to see the ads.
Now, skip all!
null
rideontime
The AI-generated raccoon in 2024 sure is a gut punch after seeing the lovingly rendered art from yesteryear. Completely devoid of the personality of the originals, even in the Christmas card, he can only dream of living up to the standard they set.
mrob
There's an inconsistent mix of human hands and raccoon paws in the same image. I thought diffusion models could do inpainting of pre-existing images. If somebody actually cared they could have picked one and erased and regenerated the other.
null
bregma
Not a single one of those images depict a single trash panda eating garbage, having babies in an attic, or defecating all over the house.
linksnapzz
Those raccoons work on the IT side; only the more presentable marketing raccoons get into catalog pics.
Having a PC Connection catalog w/ raccoons doing more stereotypical rural NH shenanigans (driving a snowmobile drunk on NightTrain; fleeing the cops on dirtbikes, operating bootleg roadside fireworks stands...) might've been hard to get approval for.
roughly
They’ve got a life outside of work, you know.
It's buried deep in the article, but what made PC Connection amazing was the shipping.
You could phone call a human in the wee hours of the morning, and have it show up later that same day. Or pay only a little and have it into two days. Compared to every other mail-order retailer in the universe at the time, it was insane, to have such selection and speed.