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In 1989 The Simpsons were still on the drawing board, and cartoonist Matt Groening was a freelance illustrators, and Apple was a rising company whose ungainly, boxlike beige computers boasted lordly hard drives of 40 mbs.

Put them together and you have Matt Groening’s Apple ‘Student’s Guide—which was probably a pretty good gig for an underground cartoonist at the time. The guide, reproduced at Retronaut, includes Groening-esque portraits of those who might need a computer, including the Clueless, the Procrastinator and the Technoid…people all too familiar to us today, although those needing aid of a computer now would undoubtedly be joined by The Texter, the Facebooker, the Small Child Living in a Remote Village and your grandpa.
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4 COMMENTS

  1. Yes, there was nothing like using diskettes to install Mac software. My first Photoshop had no layers, just channels. And the monitors were tiny and black and white. Tell kids that today, they’ll just scoff at ya.

  2. “In 1989 The Simpsons were still on the drawing board, and cartoonist Matt Groening was a freelance illustrators, and Apple was a rising company whose ungainly, boxlike beige computers boasted lordly hard drives of 40 mbs. ”

    Uhm… Simpsons debuted in 1987, and by that time Groening was already fairly established (Life in Hell). And calling Apple a “rising company” at that point in time is also a few years late…

  3. I remember this promotion, as a computer retailer set up in the student union one Fall day, trying to sell computers. I remember one of the selling points was the CD-ROM drive, which COULD PLAY MUSIC WHILE YOU USED THE COMPUTER!!!! (CDs, remember those?) Otherwise, there were a few Macs (the original “portable” model) scattered around campus, some old Kaypro terminals running CP/M, PCs, and DEC100 terminals we used for local chatting. Oh, and a mainframe running UNIX, reserved for computer majors.

    “If you go to school for years and years / You’ll avoid for awhile your worst working fears.” (School is Hell)

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