Here’s a blast from the past, courtesy of Scootinger’s Blog:
This is a Mac user vs. PC user comparison from the September 1996 issue of MacAddict. (this issue was actually the premiere/first issue of MacAddict) I recently found it when going through some of my old MacAddict magazines. It doesn’t look a lot different from the “I’m a PC and I’m a Mac” Apple ads of today, at least in my opinion!
Click to see at full size.
The whole “PC users wear suits” thing is a long-standing artifact of the corporate culture of IBM, the originator of the PC. Our younger readers — and I sigh as I realize that by “younger”, I mean “those of you in your twenties or younger” — may be unaware of the legends of IBM attire. For decades, the company’s dress code — strictly enforced even though it was unwritten — was that of a right-wing lobbyist: dark suit, whie shirt, conservative tie and wing-tip shoes. Here’s an excerpt from a 1995 International Herald Tribune story that covered IBM’s relaxing of its dress code:
Jonathan B. Dick, a company lawyer, came to work at IBM’s headquarters in Armonk, New York, this week wearing a white fisherman’s sweater, black jeans and wrinkled tan boots, The New York Times reports. He recalls that on his first day at work 17 years ago he wore a dark suit, white shirt and conservative tie – all part of the standard IBM uniform – and loafers. His boss asked, “Why did you wear your bedroom slippers to work?” He was given the rest of the day off to shop for a pair of wing tips.
For the really curious, IBM actually has a section of its site devoted to pictures of IBM attire over the years. Here’s one from 1984:
Women IBMers adapted the standard dress code and made it their own. Here’s a marketing rep from 1979:
Apple, on the other hand, being a company founded in the 1970s in the Bay Area, took a more relaxed attitude to office attire and were one of the first companies to be known for allowing casual clothes in the workplace. Their only “suit” of note was Gil Amelio, and as Guy Kawasaki remarked at a keynote at a Macromedia User Conference in the late 1990s, even he understood the need to keep letting Apple employees wear jeans:
One last tidbit of info: if you’d like to dress just like the “Mac” guy from the “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” ads, the LifeClever blog has an article telling you where to shop to get the “I’m a Mac” look:
