Before The Simpsons, Matt Groening Illustrated a “Student’s Guide” for Apple Computers (1989) — openculture.com

A friend once told me of his older cousin who, for the freakish act of installing a computer in his college dorm room, found himself immediately and irrevocably dubbed “computer Jon.” This happened in the early 1980s, and boy, have times changed. They’d even changed by the late 1980s, by which time Apple’s college marketing efforts had become sufficiently advanced to require the talents of Matt Groening, best known as the man who created The Simpsons. But that prime-time animated sitcom wouldn’t begin its record-breaking run (still without an end in sight) until Christmas 1989, while the Groening-illustrated Who Needs a Computer Anyway? (which you can flip through above) appeared earlier that year. Back then, readers might well have known him first and foremost as the creator of the satirical alternative-weekly comic strip Life in Hell, which had debuted in 1977. One of its stars, the hapless but good-hearted young one-eared rabbit Bongo, even made his way to Apple brochure’s cover. Though computers themselves had long since come to dominate America’s campuses by the time I entered college, he and Groening’s other now-lesser-known characters did do their part to prepare me for academia.

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