Often to start off a New Year, peo­ple will spend a lit­tle time look­ing back. I’m going to look way back to the mid-80’s for a few posts or so here. Hope­ful­ly it’ll be of interest.

At that point in time, I was work­ing at LLNL, Lawrence Liv­er­more Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry, doing graph­ic design and illus­tra­tion. Most of the graph­ics we did were tech­ni­cal type things, as you’d imag­ine. One of my more fun reg­u­lar jobs though was to illus­trate the cov­ers of The PC News, an in-house newsletter/magazine.

Most of this stuff has nev­er been seen out­side the Lab. And it’s fun­ny to look at some of the con­cepts these illus­tra­tions address now, some 25+ years (yikes!) removed. A lot of this stuff we take for grant­ed now, the per­son­al com­put­er’s become so imbed­ded in our culture.

This first cov­er I’m post­ing was for an issue index­ing some of the more impor­tant or “pop­u­lar” sto­ries that had appeared over the pre­vi­ous year. At this late date, I don’t recall why I drew a punk, or why they would even let me do that in the first place. One thing I do recall; they made me get rid of the ray gun for pub­li­ca­tion, replac­ing it with a light­pen. So this is the first time any­one (out­side of the PC News edi­tors) has seen this in its orig­i­nal form. The small­er draw­ing was just a spot illo for the inside front cover.

There will be more PC News flash­backs to come.