Tuesday, October 1, 2013

When the Macintosh had a pinup calendar

If you think Apple has its fanatic fans today, check this out: in 1985 when the Mac was one year old, Banbury Books produced a wall calendar showing pictures not of Mac products, but members of the Mac team at Apple. MAC: The Macintosh Calendar 1985 featured photographs by D.W. Mellor. As far as I know, a product like this for the Mac never happened again. Each month had a photo depicting one or more members of the Mac team. Under each picture was a peppy caption describing the scene.



Here's Mr. January, +Chris Espinosa:


The calendar's month pages included holidays, as most calendars do, but also notations for important dates in Apple history. March 10 was "Design of the Apple I completed (1976)", December 15 was "First Apple shareholders meeting (1981)", and so on. The calendar also included birthdays of key Mac team members, in case you wanted to birthday-stalk any of these folks in the pre-Facebook era.

In addition to the big month pages, each month had a small day-sized photo of some component or accessory, such as a 3.5 inch floppy, a bunch of Macs being tested at the factory, and even an Apple-logoed delivery van.

The calendar-makers were inclusive in choosing their subjects. They depicted not only Apple's Mac celebrities of the day, but also people from the factory who were not well known. On the other hand, some folks who certainly deserved a whole page can only be found in group shots, and others are missing entirely.


I worked in Developer Technical Support, which was officially part of the marketing team, so I'm on the page for October with many other members of that team, including +Guy Kawasaki. I'm the only person on the page who's partially hidden by a Mac. This is the only time I have appeared in a pinup calendar so far.


Can you imagine Apple allowing this kind of thing to be published today? No, you cannot.

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