I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned my Arctic 81 website here on Technologizer. It’s home to Arctic Adventure, a text adventure game I wrote in Level II BASIC for the Radio Shack TRS-80 when I was in high school. It was published in a book of type-in adventures in 1981, though my triumph was lessened by the fact that I never got a copy of the book. After I was informed that a devastating bug had somehow snuck into the print version, I kind of wanted to forget the whole thing.
Arctic Adventure indeed slipped to the back of my brain until 2021, when—having procured a copy of the book—I typed it in, fixed the bug, expanded the gameplay, and figured out how to make it all work in a web browser. Its relaunch got quite a bit of attention from people charmed by the notion of me finally debugging it after 40 years.
Anyhow, I’m bringing this up now because there’s breaking Arctic Adventure news. A clever programmer named Jim Gerrie has ported the game to the Radio Shack MC-10, an ultracheap home computer from 1983 that I only vaguely remember. Jim went back to the code from the book as the basis of his adaptation, so this new version is actually much closer to the 1981 original than my 2021 revision. I have it up and running on Arctic 81, where it’s accompanied by some information on the MC-10.
Arctic 81 also has an even earlier game I wrote, maybe when I was still in junior high—a slot machine simulator—along with a 1980 text adventure by my friend Charles. It may be a quixotic little site, but I wish more people who lived through the BASIC era shared their creations and stories. If these memories aren’t documented, they’ll be lost to history.
It never occurred to me that the software I wrote in the glory days of 8-bit computing might interest anyone a few decades into the future, so I didn’t bother to file it away. But I do have two cassettes containing a puzzle game I programmed for my Atari 400. (Atari expressed interest in publishing it, but I didn’t manage to implement their suggestions for improvements.) I have failed to get that one to load on an actual Atari computer. However, it’s apparently possible to digitize and then decode old program tapes using modern software running on a non-vintage PC. Remind me to give it a try sometime. If it leads anywhere, I’ll post the results on Arctic 81.
]]>When I got my first job in technology journalism, my grandmother used to call the magazine where I worked "your catalog." I winced. But in retrospect, she wasn’t that far off. Back then, if you wanted to buy a computer product—this was the early 1990s, before the web changed everything—the odds were pretty decent that you started by buying a computer magazine.
If you remember the computer magazines of this era 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.
About a gazillion mail-order houses did business this way. The April 1991 PC World, for instance, includes advertisements for outfits such as Advanced Computer Products, Arlington Computer Products, Bulldog Computer Products, Computer Bazaar, Fast Micro, Kenosha Computer Center, NSI Computer Products, Paradise Computer Products, Telemart, and United Computer Express. Only the names and slightly varying levels of ad-design proficiency served to distinguish most of them.
But I regarded three of these companies as the industry’s giants. Whether they were the biggest, revenue-wise, I’m still not sure. It was their sustained prominence in major magazines, with multi-page spreads, that made them feel like behemoths.
One was The PC Zone, whose ads didn’t have that much of a distinct personality beyond a logo that vaguely evoked Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.
Then there was Micro Warehouse, best known for plastering its ads with photos of a winsome, headset-wearing sales rep named Kerry. I think she was a real person who actually worked there—if not, please don’t tell me.
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. Here they are in that same 1991 PC Magazine ad.
If you inspect the art closely enough, you’ll spot some boxes of vintage 1991 software, including The Microsoft Office (which, like TheFacebook.com, eventually lost its "The"). But they’re Easter eggs in a scene that is mostly about raccoons making pies—assisted by a bunny rabbit and a beaver—and playing what I assume is folk music. The piece looks like an illustration from a classy children’s book. That made sense, since Ingraham’s work in that field helped him secure his PC Connection assignment.
What on Earth was this beautifully done, homey scene—part Beatrix Potter, part Norman Rockwell—doing in a mail-order ad for computer products? The text below, by copywriter David Blistein, acknowledged that people might find it puzzling. It explained that PC Connection was based in tiny Marlow, New Hampshire (population 567) and prided itself on good customer service. The point of the characters, it said, was to add "a human touch to high tech."
It worked. And the fact that Ingraham’s art and Blistein’s copy changed in each new ad gave magazine readers a reason to stop and pay attention. (Even Micro Warehouse’s Kerry didn’t do anything but sit there leaning on a monitor.)
The golden age of PC Connection raccoon ads began in 1983 and ended well over thirty years ago. After that, the characters retained a diminished presence in the company’s marketing into the early years of this century. Then they almost wholly vanished. They have, however, remained lodged somewhere in the back of my brain. That was true even though I caught only the tail end of their heyday. (I was an Amiga fanatic until 1991, and made a point of ignoring the Microsoft-centric magazines where PC Connection advertised.)
Recently, I was shocked to find that nobody has ever told the raccoons’ story. Hence this article.
Behind the scenes, PC Connection really was a small-town success story. The company was founded by Patricia Gallup and David Hall, who’d met by chance in 1975 when both were hiking the Appalachian Trail. Gallup ended up working at Hall’s family business, a mail-order purveyor of professional audio components in Marlow. When the IBM PC came along in 1981, the company bought one to computerize its business. So did lots of other folks, creating a thriving market for software, peripherals, and various accessories.
In 1982, that inspired Gallup and Hall to start a new company dedicated to selling everything relating to IBM PCs but the PC itself. Bootstrapping their brainchild with 8,000ドル Gallup had saved, they called it PC Connection and set up shop in a former mill, colocated with the Hall family business.
Then they placed a nondescript ninth-of-a-page ad in Byte magazine, buried near the back where the space was cheaper.
By July of the following year, PC Connection had grown prominent enough that PC Magazine devoted four pages to an interview with Hall. The Q&A covered the startup’s rural operation, generous shipping policy (a flat 2ドル per order except for “a heavy item such as a monitor, drive, or printer”), and the complications inherent in selling PC products in an era when many weren’t that easy to figure out and almost every customer was a newbie.
“If someone wants us to take him through every step of [Lotus] 1-2-3, that’s a lot to ask,” Hall told PC Mag‘s Corey Sandler. But “Let’s say someone buys a board, gets it home, and then realizes he doesn’t know what he’s doing. If he calls us on the phone, our technical man will step him right through the whole installation, tell him how to set the switches, and make sure he’s happy. That’s my idea of support.”
As PC Connection flourished, its marketing ambition and budget expanded. The November 1983 PC Magazine included a three-page ad, with two of those pages featuring the standard dense list of product names and prices. But the third showed a happy customer and emphasized the company’s toll-free support and speedy shipping, which it argued were more important than rock-bottom prices. By the standards of mail-order ads of the time, it was an ambitious branding effort.
In the next issue, PC Connection did even more to stand out. The company ran a three-page ad—wedged in the middle of an interview with software legend Grace Hopper—whose first page depicting a warmly-dressed raccoon, keyboard slung over his shoulder, huddling outside its headquarters, which at the time were in a rehabbed Marlow inn. I’m unsure if he’s seeking shelter from the snow or just wants to purchase some accoutrements for his computer. But it’s a striking image that plays up PC Connection’s remote location—"only a five day drive from Silicon Valley"—as a defining selling point.
That "PC Paradise" ad and the ones to follow were the work of Church and Main, a New Hampshire ad agency—named after the intersection where its office stood—that had gotten its big break doing work for a manufacturer of ball bearings. Its prominence in the state led PC Connection cofounder Hall to challenge it during a brainstorming meeting at the company: How do you get people to not only buy PC products but buy them from a faceless, far-off mail-order operation?
Hall was open to possibilities that were "weird" and "non-traditional," remembers Church and Main art director Michael Havey. As copywriter Blistein puts it, "Computers were very scary to people—and David wanted to make them less scary."
Church and Main’s answer was a raccoon.
"You’re probably wondering, ‘Why a raccoon?’" Havey told me once I’d tracked him down, guessing correctly. "To tell you the truth, I don’t know whether I ever knew why." There is an official PC Connection boilerplate story. Raccoons, it declares, "symbolized adaptability, innovation, and tenacity—traits that underlie the company’s remarkable success." But that rationale may have been conjured up only in retrospect.
This much we do know: Blistein and his wife happened to be reading Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 book The Wind in the Willows to their young daughter. Originally published without pictures, Grahame’s work got its most familiar art in a 1931 edition with drawings by Ernest Shepard, who was even better known as the illustrator of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books. Featuring the adventures of British motoring enthusiast Mr. Toad and his friends, the world Grahame and Shepard created was quaint, cozy, and charming. It had nothing to do with PCs, but it was the furthest thing from scary.
"I had this image—I think it was me—of a mole or an otter, whatever was in The Wind in the Willows, walking in with a computer over its shoulder," says Blistein. The notion of animal characters led Havey to call in Ingraham, a local artist whose work included the award-winning illustrations for a children’s book called Porcupine Stew.
"There were other illustrators who could have done it," Havey says. "But there was no illustrator right here in rural New Hampshire, where PC Connection started, who had the time, the interest, the incredible ability that Erick had." Ingraham’s first task was to turn the spark of an idea into exploratory sketches depicting a variety of animals.
That still doesn’t explain why the one they picked was a raccoon. For years, I thought it was because the masked foragers were particularly numerous in New Hampshire. But that seems not to be the case. Instead, PC Connection’s ads cemented the association between the animals and the state in my mind, and possibly others. Ingraham does remember their remarkably dextrous paws—perfect for typing on a computer keyboard—playing a role. "Basically, we wanted something that could use its hands," he says.
As unique as the "PC Paradise" ad was, it wasn’t immediately apparent it wasn’t just a one-off. Over the next few issues of PC Magazine, PC Connection reran it a couple of times and placed other ads that consisted solely of products and prices. But in the May 1984 issue, the lone traveling raccoon from "PC Paradise" begat a trio of picnickers who’d brought their PC and dial-up modem—and a telephone with a very long cord.
From then on, Church and Main "continued to capitalize on that format and come up with scenario after scenario," says Ingraham, who remembers spitballing ideas over lunch to pitch to PC Connection. In each ad, his art was accompanied by a few paragraphs of text by Blistein, full of terrible puns and sideways cultural allusions, celebrations of Marlow’s tininess, and reminders of the benefits of doing business with PC Connection. "Mostly, it was just ’Hey, these are nice people in New Hampshire—you don’t have to be afraid of computers,’" Blistein says.
For years, painting raccoons for PC Connection ads was a commercial artist’s dream gig—enjoyable, steady, and well-paying. Ingraham took around 40 hours to complete each piece and settled on acrylic paints as his medium, in part because they dried more quickly than oils. "Everything was in crunch mode," he remembers. "[Havey] would be coming at 8:00 in the morning to pick it up, and I’m working at 5:00."
Each of Ingraham’s illustrations—which got larger, lusher, and more lavishly detailed over time—showed raccoons (and, often, other animals) engaged in some activity, frequently in a visibly rural setting. Early examples did tend to give PCs and related products a prime spot. (Ingraham, not yet a computer user himself, worked off reference photos.) This one, showing a PC Connection customer on the phone with the company while unboxing a new computer—complete with Epson FX-100+ printer—may have been the most tech-centric of them all.
Over time, however, the PCs receded into the background of Ingraham’s tableaus, sometimes literally. Most of the ads just depicted the critters living their lives, which seemed to be rich and fulfilling. It wouldn’t even occur to me to wonder if the Keebler Elves ever did anything other than bake cookies. But the PC Connection raccoons did just about everything human beings do, especially in small New England towns. (The ads rarely referred to the characters as raccoons, instead calling them "our mascots.")
For example, they went off to college.
They operated a French bakery.
They taught school.
They sought elected office.
They honored entrepreneurship (and apparently believed PC Connection’s founder to be neither Patricia Gallup nor David Hall, but one of their own).
They were visited by St. Nicholas.
They built homes.
They rang in the New Year.
They took themselves out to the ball game.
They farmed. (Someone should tell that fellow on the right with the wagon about these newfangled things called "laptop computers.")
They cared about the environment.
They got married—and hired an owl to officiate and mice to entertain.
They went snowshoeing, and possibly got lost doing it.
As you’ve probably already noticed, all the raccoon ads above except the first one offered a premium of some sort to customers who spent at least 500ドル (later raised to 750ドル and, in at least one case, 1,000ドル). Most of these products featured Ingraham raccoons, too. There were shirts, shopping bags, hats, mugs, puzzles, baseball bats, maple syrup, apples, stuffed animals, pillowcases, and more—enough to fill a catalog of their own had the company chosen to issue one. Each ad included an additional piece of Ingraham art related to the current freebie. (I particularly like the stoic dignity of the ball player.)
Scour eBay with enough devotion, and you may find vintage PC Connection swag for sale from time to time. Should an "Our Founder" statuette ever come up, please don’t bid against me.
Some of Ingraham’s most extravagant art appeared not in magazine ads but in PC Connection’s catalogs—an advertising medium I assumed the company would have considered instrumental from the beginning. But it waited until 1990 to issue one titled The First PC Connection Catalog—produced, like the ads, by Church and Main. Ingraham’s cover wasn’t another typical scene of life in Marlow. Instead, his painting featured … a raccoon sphinx and raccoon hieroglyphics.
Inside, a foldout, “The Origin of the PCs,” pronounced Marlow to be "the center of civilization" and chronicled the history of its raccoon population from cave days until, I guess, the 1990s. (One character is using a cordless phone.) It turns out Marlow gave us all technological progress from the wheel onward, and it was all invented by PC Connection’s mascots. Now we know.
This foldout is the Sistine Chapel ceiling of Ingraham raccoon art, and you can inspect it (and Blistein’s text) in more detail by clicking the image below.
On the reverse of the foldout, PC Connection cofounder Patricia Gallup explained how all this was connected—loosely—to the mail-order computer business, and noted that the company really did conduct archeological digs in Marlow.
Another masterpiece: Ingraham’s "Raccoona Lisa," from a catalog published later that year. (She’s clutching a foam peanut because PC Connection had recently eliminated them in favor of more sustainable packing materials.)
Here’s another catalog cover, provided for this article by Ingraham himself. (So far, the only editions I’ve laid hands on myself are the two shown above—as you can imagine, most people did not hang onto these 30+ years ago, making surviving examples quite rare.)
I can’t resist sharing a few examples of the material that made up the bulk of each catalog: product listings, some accompanied by evocative photos of 1990s people and 1990s computing equipment.
Getting back to the magazine ads: In the spring of 1992, PC Connection marked its tenth anniversary. It celebrated with an ad showing the raccoons of Marlow putting on a parade, complete with a band, marchers dressed as floppy disks, a beauty queen, and a raccoon balloon.
That ad turned out to be the final one in the familiar format. After more than eight years of raccoon ads, PC Connection began to tinker with the formula. It no longer played up its rural location or showed the raccoons in particularly homespun activities. The swag offers also went away.
It was subtle, but the pitches got more direct. By then, for example, PC Connection had branded its fast, cheap shipping as "Everything Overnight" and put it at the center of its identity. A flat 5ドル charge covered overnight delivery via Airborne Express regardless of how many items you ordered: You could even call until 3 a.m. and get same-day delivery. It was a triumph of logistical efficiency that presaged the Amazon age, and a major differentiator from the likes of PC Zone and Micro Warehouse.
And so PC Connection deployed its mascots in a memorable image devoted to promoting Everything Overnight.
Until I wrote this article, I’d forgotten another message that PC Connection really, really played up: It was a repeat winner of PC World’s World Class awards as the best mail-order company. (This fact had slipped my mind even though I worked at PC World from 1994-2008.) For most of their history, these awards were based on a reader poll; they reflected the popular sentiment of computer users, and PC Connection’s pride was understandable.
The accomplishment resulted in an image of a beaming raccoon wearing World Class medallions (which, as far as I know, we didn’t actually bestow), Olympics-style. The company used it frequently, with minor variations, for many years. (Havey, who marvels at the lush detail Ingraham was able to coax out of his brush, says it’s his favorite piece of raccoon art.)
The beastie in that ad might have looked less triumphant if it had known what was ahead. As the 1990s progressed, the raccoons slowly receded from the spotlight in PC Connection’s marketing. There was no tragic moment when they got the axe. They just appeared less consistently, less prominently, and less often in the form of new Ingraham artwork.
Maybe this was inevitable. Today, Havey and Blistein both recall the company losing interest in its quirky branding as the PC market grew more commoditized. "It all became about price," says Blistein. "Egghead Software was around then. And that’s when they pushed the raccoon to the back burner."
In a June 1993 ad, the company seemed to address this shift more or less directly. "Some people think that just because we have the best-looking mascots in the business, our prices must be high," read the copy. "No way!" The ad’s raccoon art remains delightful, but it’s been downsized to make room for giant-sized selling points that mattered a lot at the time: CUSTOM, COMPAQ, CHEAP, and OVERNIGHT. 5ドル.
By the end of 1993, the mascots were deemphasized further. For instance, I had to look at this ad twice before I realized it had raccoons at all.
Eventually, the wry, low-key feel that had distinguished PC Connection’s ads was replaced by splashiness, bright colors, and copious use of exclamation points. If you were lucky, one raccoon might be crammed in somewhere, possibly confusing anyone who didn’t remember the mascot’s heyday.
Along with the price wars, PC Connection’s growing emphasis on burnishing its reputation among business clients may have contributed to the raccoons’ slow-roll retirement. Ingraham knew things were changing when the company asked for art depicting one wearing a necktie. "They tried to corporate ’em up a little bit," he says. "I kind of went with the flow. But then, eventually, they were in a big building in Milford, and I’d call there to say, ‘Any raccoon sightings?’ ‘No, not really.’” (At some point along the way, the company parted ways with Church and Main, bringing its ads in-house.)
The fact that PC Connection had moved from Marlow to the comparatively bustling town of Milford (population approximately 12,000) in 1996 was a sign of its continued growth. Two years after that, it relocated to Merrimack, which was around twice Milford’s size. That was the same year the company went public, issuing stock certificates bearing an image of the medallion-wearing raccoon.
And then there was the internet—which, as it became PC Connection’s primary sales channel, greatly reduced its reliance on the magazine advertising that had given us the raccoons in the first place.
In the new century, PC Connection almost entirely scrubbed the raccoons from its public-facing image. But not quite. A largely anodyne 2010 catalog, for example, included one fingernail-sized picture of the mascot, alongside a mention that the company had been around since 1982.
By this point, the company had invested 100% of its energy on being a reliable supplier of technology products to corporate accounts. For reasons so obvious I’m not going to bother to explain them, it removed the "PC" from its name in 2016. David Hall died in 2020. But Patricia Gallup remains Connection’s board chair, 43 years after betting her 8,000ドル in savings on the proposition that people would buy computer products through the mail. They still are, to the tune of 2ドル.8 billion in sales in the company’s most recent fiscal year. (I’d hoped to speak to Gallup for this article, but was told she no longer grants interviews.)
Today, Connection’s home page looks like this. Fair warning: There’s nary a raccoon on it.
I was all ready to declare that the raccoons were entirely absent from the site until I stumbled upon a dinky, nearly unrecognizable one in the customer support section. He’s wearing a jetpack and bearing a delivery, somehow still doing his duty after all these years. Maybe he’s unaware he was canned years ago. Or simply doesn’t care.
Perhaps more important, a representative of the modern-day Connection pointed out to me that it does make a point of bringing its raccoons back for two annual traditions—though not with new art by Ingraham, I’m sorry to say. (He did his last work for the company in 1997.)
First, it still uses raccoons in its digital holiday cards. Here’s 2024’s edition.
Secondly, the Connection annual report continues to give the raccoons their due, if briefly. Each year, one appears on the bottom of the last page, like a lagniappe for long-time customers who remember them.
As for Erick Ingraham, David Blistein, and Michael Havey, I’m grateful for the fond memories they shared of the days when they helped PC Connection establish a brand that was at once offbeat and fabulously successful. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for a marketing person like me to participate in that and see that it actually worked," says Havey. "That was the tremendously fun part of it."
I’m also impressed by how much they’ve done in the years since raccoons provided them with meal tickets. Ingraham remains a busy artist whose work ranges from landscapes to fantasy to portraits of people and pets to logos and package design. Stylistically and thematically, it can be far afield of his PC Connection paintings, but it’s easy to spot similarities, too: the warmth, the wit, the love of Americana. Blistein has written documentaries (some in collaboration with Ken Burns) and books; currently, he’s serializing a novel via his Substack. Havey is still doing freelance art direction from his New Hampshire home and is also a filmmaker and photographer.
If someone were creating the 2025 equivalent of PC Connection today, would they promote it with rustic scenes of woodland creatures tilling the land, getting married, and throwing parades? Of course not. Lovingly handcrafted artwork doesn’t scale, which makes it a nonstarter on the web. Even if it did, sly charm has no place in online commerce, a medium that cares far more about shopping-cart workflows than branding. With rare exceptions such as Meh, almost every merchant has exactly the same personality, which is to say no personality at all.
I’m not saying I’d go back to the old days when PC Connection had to sell skittish computer users on the very idea of mail-order shopping. In a way, we now live in a world the company helped create. Or at least its old slogan—"Everything Overnight"—now applies to almost anything we might want delivered to our doors, in any product category. And sometimes you don’t even have to wait overnight. 1990s me would be astounded. But damn it, I do miss those raccoons—and the whole era when tech marketing had some, well, character.
I could go on. But instead, I’ll leave you with three pieces of PC Connection-related miscellany.
Miscellaneous item #1:
Though early PC Connection ads stressed that the company sold only products for the IBM PC, it quickly embraced the Macintosh. Even before it was ready to start fulfilling orders, a division called MacConnection ran an ad in the second issue of Macworld, a few months after Apple unveiled its groundbreaking machine in January 1984. That was the start of a long-running campaign, originally with ads that were also produced by Church and Main and clever in their own right. But they featured human Mac users, not raccoons, so someone else will have to write about them.
Miscellaneous item #2:
Immersing myself in PC Connection lore for this article prompted me to check my archive of ancient Lotus Notes email to see if I’d ever received any correspondence from the company when I worked at PC World. I do still have one such message, from 1999, and it’s kind of—oh, read it for yourself:
Miscellaneous item #3:
Back in the day, PC Connection took customer service so seriously that it began bundling free videotapes on topics such as installing hard disks with orders. This effort led to the company installing a satellite uplink and operating PCTV, a full-blown tech news service featuring experts such as my friends Mike Elgan and Jim Heid. I have a fuzzy memory of a colleague telling me I could probably appear myself if I was willing to make the trek from Boston to the PCTV studio in New Hampshire. I didn’t seize the opportunity. And now it’s gone forever.
As far as I know, the raccoons never appeared on PCTV. I’d be thrilled to be proven wrong.
Apologies for the continued self-indulgent excavation of my own work, but after indexing my TIME.com columns and preserving my tweets, I’m back with links to the 952 posts I wrote for my PC World blog Techlog between 2004 and 2008. Until now, I’ve considered them to be more or less lost. At some point after I left PC World, the publication decided to pull the plug on its blogs, which were hosted on an increasingly archaic platform called Moveable Type. I’m not postive when it happened—possibly during a redesign of the site in 2012—but was ages ago. And I might have been the only outsider who noticed or cared.
Even the Wayback Machine’s copies of the blog were broken, due to its inability to deal with the navigation menu we’d constructed. If you found one Techlog post, there was no obvious way to click around to all the other ones. All you got were broken links. Recently, though, I made a discovery. By manually editing the Wayback URLs, it was possible to get to all my blog posts after all. They were all there—just hidden, as if they’d been stored in rooms without any doors or windows.
I am not inordinately proud of these posts, none of which I’d rank among the 50 things I’m most pleased to have written. But I will take credit for convincing PC World to get into blogging, back when some of the people who worked at old-school media companies still scoffed at blogs as being insufficiently lofty journalistic enterprises. I still have an April 2003 email in which I hatched a plan to prioritize the project with my colleague Matthew Newton, who still blogs; it took another year before Techlog went live. It became quite popular, as did other blogs we launched thereafter.
I was in charge of PC World editorial at this point and didn’t consider Techlog to be one of my primary responsibilities. Looking at the timestamps, I see that I often published early in the morning, in the evening, and on weekends. But I did love writing at web speed, working without a net, and getting instant feedback from commenters. Even as PC World’s editor, my print column—which I renamed Techlog to match the blog—was subject to multiple layers of editing and a weeks-long production cycle. With the blog, when something popped into my head, it was almost easier to write it than to surpress the urge. Google News was ridiculously kind to PCWorld.com stories, and I could just about make my posts pop up at the top of its headlines at will.
Looking back, I’m reminded that this was a fun period to be blogging about personal tech. I covered the launches of Gmail and the iPhone, plus stuff that seemed to matter at the time, such as Google Gears and UMPCs. I wrote a ton about Firefox, one of my favorite products from this period. Once I figured out Twitter—not so easy a feat at the time—I wrote about it, too. Maybe best of all, I liveblogged several Steve Jobs keynotes—how I miss doing that.
What follows is a reverse-chronological index of all my Techlog posts. Sadly, some of the images have disappeared, as have all the embedded videos. But the text is intact, and along with linking to all of it on the Wayback Machine, I’ve added some interjections of historical context. As with all my old stuff I’m reviving here, I don’t expect you to dig in. But it’s kind of a relief to no longer consider this work to have vanished from the face of the web.
World’s Biggest Wireless Hot Spot!
On March 7, 2007, I tweeted—though it wasn’t yet called that—for the first time. I remember feeling like I was late to the platform: If I understand how member ID codes work, I was the 817,268th person to sign up.
I didn’t really figure Twitter out until some point in 2008. Once I did, it became one of my primary modes of communcation. I had loads of fun and my share of glory. Early on, for example, TechRepublic named me as the #1 techie to follow. (I can’t prove it, as any evidence long ago vanished from it website.) I came up with the idea for TWTRCON, a conference about using Twitter for business that drew the likes of MC Hammer and Martha Stewart as attendees. And then there was Animoji Karaoke, the Twitter fad I launched.
Over the years, I pretty much accomplished everything I wanted to on Twitter except hitting 100,000 followers, a dream that seemed within my grasp until I was almost there and my count began to slowly roll backwards. But from the start of the Elon Musk era, using Twitter—I’m done with calling it “X”— has felt like habituating a once-wonderful restaurant whose new chef has been intentionally poisoning the stew.
As Musk wrecked the joint, I tweeted less and less, until my feed consisted of little more than sporadic complaints about Twitter and heartfelt salutes to recently-deceased celebrities. Even tweeting links to my own stories felt increasingly pointless: the site sends few clicks nowadays, which would seem to belie the theory that it’s some sort of essential news source for hundreds of millions of people.
In 2024, Musk’s escalating use of his own account to spread hate and misinformation has been appalling and embarrassing. So has has Twitter’s pivot to being a nearly official arm of the Trump campaign. Election Night broke me. Yet there was one glimmer of heartening news: Just as I was deciding to stop tweeting altogether, a huge percentage of the people who’d kept me clinging to the site were embracing Bluesky, a social networking upstart that’s far more like the Twitter of yore than Musk’s dumpster fire is. This sudden talent migration has been head-snapping and exhilirating.
Instead of lurking on Twitter, which I thought would remain tempting, I’m using an excellent app called Openvibe—I wrote about it here—to smoosh Bluesky, Mastodon, and a dash of Threads into one experience. It’s an infinitely better place to spend time than what Elon hath wrought. Here are links to where you’ll find me these days.
Now, some of the folks who are part of the Twitter exodus are removing all evidence they were ever there by deleting all their tweets. I have no plans to go that far. With rare exceptions, I think everything should remain on the internet forever, with as few broken links as possible. Then again, I also don’t trust Elon Musk to preserve my history. I mean, doesn’t erasing dormant accounts in bulk sound like a genius idea he’d come up with?
Which led me to wonder: Could I make a public collection of my tweets available?
I could—and I have. Twitter has long offered a tool for downloading a browser-based archive of all your activity. It’s pretty cool, actually—it lets you peruse all your tweets from the privacy of your own computer, and there’s a built-in search engine that’s radically better than anything on Twitter itself. It even retains Twitter branding: Musk never got around to X-ifying it.
So I grabbed an archive of my entire Twitter history, figured out how to remove elements such as DMs, and am making it available at Technologizer.com/twitter. It’s not perfect. For instance, links I shared don’t unfurl into cards (one of Twitter’s best features, until Elon decided to ruin it). My replies are in there, but you’ll need to click back to Twitter to see the tweets that prompted them; retweets look kind of like they did back when they involved pasting the original tweet into one of your own. There also doesn’t seem to be any formal way to link to a specific tweet, though there’s an easy workaround.
Flaws and all, this archive is mine. As long as I remember to pay my hosting bill, it’ll remain available no matter what further indignities transpire at Twitter. It’s nice to remember my presence there the way it once was It represents 17 years of my life, and amounts to a public diary of sorts. I’m sure I’ll refer to it periodically, and if I’m the only one who ever does, that’s fine. Still, I do hope that I inspire other folks to liberate their own tweets while it’s still possible. If nothing else, everyone should file theirs away on a hard drive for safekeeping.
One other thing: When you download your Twitter archive, it includes a folder with all the images you’ve ever shared, back to when the platform introduced native image hosting. Using my Mac’s Quick Look feature, I turned mine into a video. Watch all 12,608 images flash by—it’ll take slightly over 13 minutes—and you’ll get as clear a view of the inside of my brain as I ever intend to give anyone. Seriously: An LLM trained on this stuff would render me obsolete.
Okay, maybe “lost” is overstating things. Still, I tend to forget about most of the stuff I write the moment I’m done with it. So I certainly don’t have vivid recollections of writing my weekly Technologizer column for TIME.com, which I did from September 2010 until February 2012.
But when I was freeze-drying the Technologizer website, I created an index of every Technologizer post. It dawned on me that the index was far from complete, because quite a few of the words I wrote under the Technologizer banner were published on TIME.com, not Technologizer.com. And at first—before I joined TIME‘s staff— they appeared every Tuesday (later shifted to Thursday) in TIME.com’s Business section.
Technologizer on TIME wasn’t too different from Technologizer.com. I probably stuck more consistently to addressing a big, mainstream audience, and tried to cover the big topics of the day: smartphones, tablets, social networking, the evolving PC, and various things that seemed interesting at the time, such as Quora, OnLive, and Blekko. My wonderful editors, Jim Frederick (whom I still can’t believe is gone) and, later, Doug Aamoth, barely touched what I wrote. I think most of the headlines are mine, and nearly all of the topics are—though Jim did ask me to write about a dust-up behind the scenes at TechCrunch. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to cover that, and the piece turned out quite well.
Compiling the list of stories below was complicated by the ramshackle state of TIME.com’s archives. It’s possible that all these pieces are still there, but I have two author pages on the site—here and here—and neither includes my columns. When I began writing for TIME, most of its online tech coverage—except for Technologizer—appeared on an excellent semi-standalone site called Techland. TIME asked me to write a weekly post for that site promoting my column; those items are on one of my author pages, but the links to the columns they reference are now broken. Also, those Techland posts were eventually folded into TIME.com and are now labeled as Technologizer pieces, which they weren’t originally.
Since TIME, like most major media outlets, can’t be trusted to preserve everything—at least in minty condition at the original URL—I decided to link to the columns as they appear on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, sometimes with a missing image or two. I think I found all of them. We might or might not have considered the final article below to have been a column—it appeared around the time I joined the staff and segued from columnist to full-time writer.
I don’t plan to spend much time reading these old pieces, so I can hardly expect that you will. Just skimming the headlines below is a nice, efficient way to get a sense of what was going on in consumer tech at the time, though. Everyone was trying to beat the iPad. Streaming TV was picking up steam. People were beginning to have qualms about Google and Facebook. Cars were getting smart. And the death of Steve Jobs was a moment like we’d never seen before.
I’m not going to try to index every Technologizer piece I wrote for TIME.com as a staffer from 2012-2014—there are just too many. (I did list some in this roundup of the best of Technologizer.) Nor have I yet compiled a list of the Technologizer columns that appeared in TIME‘s print edition. But I am still proud that my little gadget blog’s brand extensions included a presence in the world’s most famous news magazine—especially in print, but also in the form of these online originals.
It hardly seems possible that it’s been nearly sixteen years since I pressed publish on my first Technologizer post. Back then, the iPhone had been on sale for less than a year. Android phones, Chrome, Bitcoin, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Oculus, and the iPad didn’t exist yet. The current version of Windows was Vista, Circuit City and CompUSA were still in business, and Elon Musk was not yet CEO of Tesla, let alone Twitter.
Another thing that’s happened since 2008 is that the some of the software I used to build the site—and later to update it—have long since tumbled into the abyss of obsolesence. It’s not just that the WordPress theme I chose and customized in 2008 no longer works with modern versions of PHP. Even the more modern one I used for new posts from 2014 onward won’t.
My webhost has been letting me use an ancient version of PHP, but they now charge me a monthly fee for the privilege and their dunning letters have grown only more urgent. Along with knowing my themes were obsolete, I also grew worried that the site’s many venerable plugins might stop working, which led me to put off critical WordPress updates.
Now, it’s been 12 years since Technologizer was my main outlet, and for a long time it was largely dormant. But I never saw the site as a relic, and last year I even began writing the occasional post for it again. Keeping it extant mattered to me. So recently, I decided to rid the site of its crushing technical debt forever—a process I think of as freeze-drying it.
Using an excellent Mac app called SiteSucker, I converted the 6,500-plus posts we published between May 2008 and earlier this month into flat HTML pages that no longer require WordPress, plugins, PHP, a MySQL database, or any other special software. For new posts such as this one, I started fresh with a new install of WordPress, a new theme that should keep ticking for years, and a modest selection of current plugins. I figured out how to jimmy together the flat-HTML old pages and the new WordPress site without breaking the links. Using Google Programmable Search, I even got the search feature to continue working and support both Old Freeze-Dried Technologizer and Shiny New Technologizer.
(Side note: Several times, as I was futzing around with all this, ChatGPT amazed me by providing clear instructions for solving an arcane technical problem that had confounded me. It’s one of my best experiences with generative AI so far.)
The old posts didn’t really lose anything by being flattened into static HTML, in part because I’d already closed the comments sections on most of them. There are still a few ways in which these pages remain reliant on external services, such as their use of hosted fonts. Maybe I’ll free them of those dependencies someday, but even if any of them become problematic, they shouldn’t keep the site from working.
In their new flat form, the archived Technologizer posts won’t be easy to edit; easy editing, after all, is one of the principal reasons to use a content management system like WordPress. That forced me to make some basic decisions, such as: Before I freeze-dried old posts, should I eliminate their plugs for our now-defunct Google+ presence? I decided to leave them as is, figuring that the old pages’ stuck-in-time aspects are actually kind of cool. After all, we don’t expect print magazines from thirty, forty, or more years ago to mysteriously lose their anachronisms. Instead, we’re often charmed by them.
(Rather than tampering with my original template, I also left the ads on the old pages intact even though they make me almost nothing these days .I stopped running ads on new posts back in 2014.)
I’m still wrapping up work on certain pages, and I can’t tell you that absolutely everything we ever did has survived in minty condition. One or two obscure sections of Technologizer have long been broken. I didn’t try to fix them, since I can’t remember what they were like in the first place. We used to have quite a lot of fun stuff going on in the sidebar, such as daily links from around the web; most of that got deprecated in past redesigns. Some material involving embeded services is lost forever: I deeply regret using a liveblogging product called CoverItLive, which nuked a lot of our event coverage, including my updates from the Apple events where Steve Jobs answered my questions. But 99.435921% of Technologizer history is here, including many fabulous stories by people other than me, including Benj Edwards, Jared Newman, Ed Oswald, David Worthington, and others. There’s even an otherwise unpublished interview with Steve Jobs by Laura Locke.
Along with preventing the site from collapsing in a cloud of dust right now, extricating most of it from WordPress gives me some confidence it will remain accessible in some form for as long as anyone cares to read it. I could even stick everything we’ve done up until now on a thumb drive, and it would work. Whether anyone will want to revisit vintage tech blogs a few generations from now is up to posterity. But for an itty-bitty site, we did okay. We got quoted by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, cited by Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs, and footnoted by Steve Ballmer in a CES keynote presentation. I’m still stumbling across new references to our old stories. I think it would be a shame if something as mundane as software incompatibilities took the site offline.
Technologizer is also the only repository of my writing about technology that I could rescue on my own. I see that as a responsibility as well as an opportunity, especially since keeping old web content available is not exactly a priority for many media companies. I’m happy to report that everything I’ve written for Fast Company since 2014 remains online and intact. But strange things have happened to the templates on some of the stories I wrote for TIME, including the more than two years’ worth of Technologizer posts I wrote when the blog was part of TIME.com. One of my favorite pieces for that publication—a new introduction to an iPad reissue of the 1983 Machine of the Year issue—got deleted years ago in a purge of all of TIME‘s tablet editions. Worst of all, I think it’s possible that the entirety of my contributions to PC World as a staffer—for 13 years, people!—was long ago eradicated from PCWorld.com.
It’s not just stuff I wrote and/or edited that I’m worried about. My late friend Don Brockway had a wonderful pop-culture blog called Isn’t Life Terrible? After he died in 2011, it lost its domain name. Many of its images, videos, and audio clips disappeared, and it eventually got hacked. Nobody even knew how to log into any of his accounts to try to repair things. With the help of Don’s family and friends, I created a restored version at DonBrockway.net—a rewarding experience that was way more involved than de-WordPressing the Technologizer archive. (I’m still looking for some of the missing media that Don embedded—if the video of the original Mouseketeers’ 1975 reunion on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow show ever resurfaces, it will be a great day.)
There are unimaginable quantities of worthwhile stuff on the World Wide Web that will eventually fall victim to the ravages of time in one way or another. As wonderful as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is, it doesn’t capture everything or store it with perfect fidelity, and it can be tough to find stuff unless you already know it’s there. Having freeze-dried two sites in standalone form, I heartily recommend such acts of preservation to everyone else in a position to seize the opportunity. The web is all too fragile, but we have the power to make it at least slightly more permanent.
Bonus material for anyone who’s still reading: Here’s a slightly fuzzy version of my aforementioned introduction to TIME’s 1983 Machine of the Year reissue. (I was smart enough to screen-grab it on my iPad before it went bye-bye.)
