The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great | Hacker News Reader

The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great

technologizer.com

185 pointscoloneltcb41 comments

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.

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.

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...

Artist website: https://www.erickingraham.com/

good point, will reach out! best to go straight to the source :)

There are ML upscalers optimized for illustrations you can run locally for these scenarios. Doesn't require bleeding edge hardware either.

true, good idea. got an RTX3080 at home and tinkered around with stable diffusion when it came out. maybe that's my first genuine use-case after all this time. i first want to contact the artist, though. as far as i understand, artists tend to be weirded out if people start AIing their work.

"The point of the characters, it said, was to add 'a human touch to high tech.'"

Something we need today, too

Love these. The artist's commented too: https://technologizer.com/home/2025/04/22/pc-connection-ads-...

It's kind of odd, seeing the MicroWarehouse Girl.

I very much remember her, smiling out from many different magazines.

Immediately recognized her. She must have made it across the pond to the UK. Maybe it was BYTE. Loved that magazine.

I absolutely adore this article on computer ad history.

What ever became of the Private Eye headset? Seems amazing for the time.

These are wonderful illustrations, and (in addition to the marketing, metaphors and puns) they emphasize that the PC is a handy tool that can be useful in many contexts - home, work, school, recreation - but the context and the people (er, animals) are what is important, not the PC.

AST had raccoons on one or two of his books, earlier editions of “ Operating Systems Design and Implementation” iirc. I always thought cartoon raccoons on the cover of a technical text book seemed like an odd choice. I wonder if there’s a connection?

I think you're right. I'll check when I get home this evening.

I just checked my copy of Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, copyright 1987, and find that I was wrong: it does not have a raccoon on the cover. This is of course not to say that you are wrong--you may have had a different edition.

I love the ones where they're sitting outside or in a window.

Finally we're getting screens bright enough (1,000+ Nits) in laptops. The dream has always been to liberate ourselves to a better work/play environment.

Might be hugged to death, no current copies on archive.org or archive.today :(

It eventually loaded for me, which was a surprise.

Archived now: https://archive.is/BxyNA

Feeling cognitive dissonance given this is making me feel nostalgic for advertising.

True, before was cool to see the ads.

Now, skip all!

Before they were FUCKING EVERYWHERE.

Like Christ. I wouldn't be as anti-ad as I am if it didn't feel like I was being screeched at continuously from when I wake to when I sleep to BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY

It's because they are simply advertising a product. It's the "lifestyle" ads that people hate so much.

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.

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.

Perhaps the model was trained on too much furry art?

It wouldn't make that sort of mistake then.

Furry art is not in any way consistent with the use of human and animal anatomy. You'll absolutely see a mix of paws and hands

If you mean https://i0.wp.com/technologizer.com/home/wp-content/uploads/... It's definitely a weird image. The hands are oddly accurate, and the geometry in the background is also unusually straight and correct for a low-end corporate 2024 Bing DALL-E or Stable Diffusion slop image. And in the bottom image, the food is way too sharp, and the sci-fi text UI is also way too accurate.

So I am suspicious something else is going on to produce the overall uncanny effect of wrongness: possibly they used Photoshop to paste on a bunch of unrelated images to some low-quality stock-art backgrounds?

I think it's AI + human editing.

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.

They’ve got a life outside of work, you know.

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.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/538774203378171935/11...

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...

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