If we've learned one thing today, it's that AtAT viewers are nothing if not keen-eyed. Reports of Mac sightings in PC-oriented ads flooded our virtual switchboards all day long. Since Macs are used so heavily in the graphics and content-creation areas, it seems that two factors are contributing to this phenomenon. First of all, if you need a picture of a computer for an ad, it's easiest to snap a photo of your own, so many Macs get cameo walk-on roles as PC's. And secondly, some of the Mac-faithful who are pushing those pixels are intentionally inserting Mac elements in a splefty little display of guerilla evangelism.

For instance, faithful viewer Thomas Clement notes the highest-profile and most blatant occurrence: "Every Best Buy color supplement in the L.A. Times shows PCs for sale, yet every GUI the PC monitors sport is that of the Macintosh. [Ed. note: It's tough to see at screen-res, but those sure look like Mac Netscape screens in this ad.] This has been going on for months! Perhaps Best Buy's ad agency should be commended for being the first to port Star Trek successfully to a Wintel machine." You heard it here first-- Best Buy is selling PC's running the Mac OS on an NT kernel. Run right out and buy a few. ;-P

David Weingart found one of the most amusing instances: "Check out this web page: <http://www.jasc.com/download.html > Check out the navigation bar at the top of the page. It very clearly shows what appears to be an 8500 (attached to a one button mouse, no less). This is the website for Paint Shop Pro, a Windows-only shareware image manipulation software. I emailed the webmaster and he strongly hinted that the graphics were created using Paint Shop Pro on the pictured 8500 using Virtual PC! So, the page to download a Windows-only product pictures a Macintosh, and the webmaster would rather use a Mac to run Virtual PC, than actually use a PC. Amazing!" Indeed.

Lastly, we received a behind-the-scenes report from a closet AtAT addict who shall remain nameless, as his email address falls squarely within the microsoft.com domain and he doesn't need Bill Gates slapping him around. As it turns out, our anonymous little mole reports that at least two of the cities (and probably the rest) on Microsoft's Sidewalk.com use Macs in the production of their graphics. Now, while that doesn't tell us anything we couldn't have guessed, it's the next little tidbit that really sounds cool: "While getting our one Quadra onto the LAN to access the Apple filesharing folder through the NT server, I discovered HUNDREDS of Macs on the corporate WAN AppleTalk zone listing. And I'm not exaggerating by HUNDREDS." And yet another anonymous Microsoft employee confirms that MicroNews, the internal Microsoft newsletter that is distributed to every mailslot on the Redmond campus, is produced on a Power Computing Mac clone running Pagemaker. Wheeeee! First-hand confirmation always makes us a bit giddy. ;-)