If you remember the computer magazines of [the early 1990s] at all, you recall how thick they were—hundreds and hundreds of pages an issue in the case of the most successful ones. The majority of those pages were ads, not editorial content. And a sizable chunk of those ads were catalog-y in the extreme. Pages and pages were devoted to lists of products and prices in teensy type, with 1-800 numbers you could call to place an order.But the crème de la mail-order crème was a company called PC Connection.In a field where it was hard for any one merchant to stand out, PC Connection’s ads were vastly more distinctive than the competition’s. They might even one of the most memorable elements of any given issue of a magazine—yes, including the editorial material.It wasn’t because of the portion dedicated to the business at hand. As you can see from this sample page from the October 29, 1991 PC Magazine, that aspect of a PC Connection advertisement was not radically different from a PC Zone or Micro Warehouse ad.No, what made PC Connection ads unique was the imagery of anthropomorphic raccoons, the work of an illustrator named Erick Ingraham.
Harry McCracken, technologizer.com; April 22, 2025
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