This is prob­a­bly the last of my PC News posts. Time to move out of the 80’s!

The first cov­er here was for an issue announc­ing that PC News was going the Desk­top Pub­lish­ing route. Things weren’t entire­ly dig­i­tal yet in those days; for exam­ple, we still had to paste up all the type the Mac was going to be burst­ing through here. Pho­to­shop did­n’t yet exist, so we did the mag­a­zine using Aldus Page­mak­er, Adobe Illus­tra­tor, Mac­Draw and Mac­Draft! Any non-dig­i­tal­ly-cre­at­ed art like this still had to be pho­to­stat­ted, then run through a smelly device called a wax­er (I don’t know if those things even exist any­more), so it could then be bur­nished by hand down onto the page.

The sec­ond cov­er was for a fea­tured arti­cle in a fol­lowup edi­tion, “The Pin­na­cles and Pit­falls of Desk­top Pub­lish­ing.” Because of course, since it was still ear­ly days with these machines, there were prob­lems you’d encounter. I remem­ber get­ting that screen with the bomb logo a num­ber of times! It was fun to come up with all the lurk­ing bugs here for this illustration.

And that’s it for now, from the Lab in 1985!

And here’s yet anoth­er PC News cov­er flashback.

Once again, I’m not real­ly sure what’s going on here. Too much water under the bridge since then. There’s a tick­le of a thought in the back of my mind that this might be rel­a­tive to some pro­gram called “Jazz,” though I’m not sure.

What­ev­er it is, I kind of liked how the illus­tra­tion came out for its own sake. Jazz musi­cians with old school Mac­in­tosh­es for heads? Works for me!

I think there’ll be one more of these cov­er posts to come.

Still more PC News cov­er “flash­back-ing” in public.

This cov­er dealt with an astound­ing new con­cept: the idea of two com­put­ers being able to com­mu­ni­cate with each other…over phone lines! Isn’t mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy amaz­ing?

What?? Well, I did say in my first post on these that it was weird look­ing back at all these con­cepts that we take for grant­ed now. Don’t for­get: this was done around 1984/1985.

Still more to come.

Here’s anoth­er PC News cov­er flash­back from my LLNL days, cir­ca ’84/’85.

Umm, what to say about this one? I don’t know that I can ful­ly explain what’s going on here any­more. Too many years removed. I think what’s going on is that this was for an arti­cle talk­ing about how they were able to give PC’s ver­bal instruc­tions and have them trans­lat­ed into prop­er com­put­er lan­guage, but then you can prob­a­bly pick up that much from it on your own.

And for rea­sons I don’t recall, I was play­ing around with a qua­si-Chester Gould “Dick Tra­cy” look. Though I no longer ful­ly under­stand what I was try­ing to do here, I still think it was kind of a fun piece.

The “flash­back-ery” will continue.

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.