Business cards

1978 - 2015

In the olden days before smartphones, people with jobs had little paper business cards they handed out to provide their contact info. Recently I unearthed a bunch of my old business cards and set 'em up for this photo. I don't have a card from every job I ever had - they didn't give me one when I was an assistant cook at A&W Root Beer, for example, and I don’t think I ever had one when I worked at Danger Labs – and this is probably the most I'll ever find.

I had the first one (“Microcomputers”) printed up when I was 18 years old and getting some work writing software for the first Radio Shack TRS-80 computers. I claimed to do “systems design” on that card – I’m sure I had no idea what that actually meant. The middle one in the first row (“International Apple Core”) was an organization that worked with early Apple user groups. That job got me an Apple-paid trip to see the Apple /// introduction in Anaheim in 1980.

When I started working at Apple, I found out that thanks to an innovation by Andy Hertzfeld, you could get away with a clever job title on your business card. So we did. When I got my first Apple card (second row, second from the right), I was inspired by my technical support job and by Boy George to get “Boy Guru” as my title. Later, I worked in a group that was called “class” because it made object-oriented programming tools. So I was “class clown”.

The cards tell stories

Design fans can look at my 4 different Apple business cards and see how the card typography and graphics changed over the years. Microsoft Kremlinologists who are not easily bored can note the subtle changes in where Microsoft stashed us Macintosh folks over the years.

Much later, while working at Google in my 50s, I tried to estimate how many employees there were older than me and I ordered cards that said “73rd Oldest Googler.” That was definitely a conversation starter. I had to explain that it was just an educated guess.

The companies where I worked always ordered far more business cards than I ever needed, even before smartphones made them pretty much obsolete. I still have boxes of my old business cards, and now they’re useful for writing notes on the back. Although I mostly do that on my phone too.