Tab ad from 1964. There is a mysterious Tab swilling tribe that still lives among us:

“This is a lonely but inspired society,” David Bradley, the owner of The Atlantic Monthly andNational Journal, said recently, before news of the brand’s reëngineering had spread. “You can’t imagine the purchasing and trucking and warehousing issues we address in getting Tab into Washington.”

The original Tab, which appeared in 1963, is still produced, though in dwindling quantities. You’d be unlikely to find it at Gristedes, however, because Coke stopped promoting the drink in the mid-eighties, after the cancer scare involving saccharin, an artificial sweetener used in Tab. Present-day Tab enthusiasts must seek out wholesalers (New York Beverage, in the Bronx, is a local favorite) or rely on a kind of sixth soda sense—“the ability to spot the pink,” David Edelstein, the film critic for New York, calls it—in obtaining their daily fixes.

For more about the mysterious worshippers of the Pink Can click here.