Apple's 1984 Ad with a twist...
 

Been by Apple's site lately?

I surfed by tonight, to look at the news from MacWorld, and saw that they had QT copies of the original 1984 commercial. I remember that commercial like it was yesterday. My boss bought a Macintosh about 3 days after the release. I have had one or three since that day. With that back story, it is no surprise that I immediately clicked the link for the commercial, ready for a little nostalgia.

Wait a minute.....she's got something on her belt that wasn't there 20 years ago.

Check it out. Steven's animators are absolutely the best in the business.

Hey...I didn't even notice that!

Good animation, but nothing we haven't seen before really.

I have never understood the appeal of that commercial. But on the subject of the iPod, I definitely prefer other brands of "digital jukeboxes" since they can record live and have digital/optical ins and outs.

Now that is one impressive piece of animation! Wow.

Here is a small piece of trivia for all the real Mac addicts out there. How many times did the commercial air?

I believe it may have only "officially" aired once, on the Super Bowl broadcast.

Eh?

Nifty.

Internet Explorer reports an "Object expected" error on the video page...

You -did- give them your credit card number, didn't you, Robert?

In keeping with industry tradition, Chiat/Day paid $10 to run 1984 in the 1:00 A.M. sign-off slot on December 15, 1983, at a small television station (KMVT, Channel 11) in Twin Falls, Idaho, thereby ensuring that the commercial would qualify for that year's advertising awards.

This commercial, designed by the advertising agency Chiat/Day to introduce Apple's Macintosh computer and directed by Ridley Scott fresh off his science fiction classic Blade Runner, has never run again since that Super Bowl spot. But few commercials have ever been more influential. Advertising Age named it the 1980s' Commercial of the Decade.

Sources:

http://www.cpinternet.com/cmcalone/cine/1984.html

Also my trusty Maclopedia

Sharon,

First time during the XXXVII 1984 Super Bowl...that one I'm pretty sure about. But I think it aired three more times...for some reason that number sticks in my head.

Did I win? Did I win? What's the prize?

Aw, John and I both lost, technically! The answer was 2. Nuts. I had the prize money already spent #-(

Ah...but don't forget the one showing at the Apple shareholder's meeting that year and also the one showing at the Clio awards. Four. Pay up!

You win. I do have to admit that those were not airtime broadcasts.

Supposedly (according to folks today on Macintouch and MacCentral) it was shown only ONE time as paid for by Apple. The second showing for the Clio award was paid for by Chiat/Day, and the MANY more showings were from reviewers, critics, and "Commercial Collection" shows.

It really was shown for the Clio awards? I should go in the BS business...wait a minute...I AM in the BS business. ;)

Since we are Mac addicts may I ask which was the first MacIntosh model you owned.

Mine was a 512ke.

<blushing>
Well, Sharon, I am a newcomer to the Mac world. I worked almost exclusively in the PC world since even before the PC was created. (The Imsai 8080 was the first "personal" computer with which I worked.) It wasn't until after I retired that I converted to Macs (and haven't looked back).

My first Mac, a 500MHz dual G4, is still on my desk...collecting dust these days. But I've certainly tried to make up for lost time. In the past 2 years I've purchased two desktops (my current main workhorse is a dual 1GHz G4) and three Powerbooks (500MHz G3 Pismo, 500MHz G4 TiBook, and a 1GHz G4 TiBook). The darn things are like peanuts...I can't stop grabbing them!

First one I used was the original. I struck out on my own a couple years later and bought a MacPlus (cool! an internal hard drive!)

Yeah! How big was the drive.

Couldn't remember, Sharon, so I looked it up. I was wrong. The Plus didn't have an internal. I had a "huge" 10Mb external. My MacII was my first with an internal drive -- an unfillable 40Mb.

JFTR -- you can look up the spec sheet on ANY Macintosh at Apple's site -- even the original (but not AppleII's).

There was a product called the "Hyperdrive" from a company called GCC which was an aftermarket hard drive that was introduced for the Mac 512k ("fat Mac"). It was very expensive and required modification of your computer to install. IIRC the capacity was 5 MB. Never actually used one however.

I had a Mac 512k, which I upgraded to a 523ke (a ROM upgrade and swap for an 800k internal floppy drive), and I remember buying an Apple Hard Disk 20 external drive as soon as it came out. I think it cost $1,000 but offered the seemingly limitless capacity of 20 megabytes! This was perhaps the slowest hard drive ever made; it connected to the Mac using the external floppy drive port. But we sure thought it was cool back in 1985... :-)

On my RAM Disk from the 512ke I had the operating system and one program MacWrite which the documents had to be saved there. On another RAM Disk I had MacPaint WOW one whole application with the System Software.

The first Mac I used was at a university library back in 1986. I can't remember what the model was, but I remember thinking that the first Mac I owned, the little screen box model, was a BIG improvement.

Now people are making those into aquariums.