Remembering Apple’s 1984 ad

On the 40th anniversary of the Apple Super Bowl ad for the first Macintosh computer, we remember the people who created the ad as well as a time when hackers hoped to liberate computing.

It is no small historical irony that today,  the most restrictive and least liberated of the big tech companies  is Apple.

When the ad first aired — once, at the Super Bowl on Jan 22, 1984 — it was such a strong and unusual claim that it was replayed over and over on network television.   The claim was that this computer represented a vision of a free internet.  That is, free as in “free markets” and “free speech” — freedom from censorship and dark cycle forced purchases.   Computing that could afford to be ethical. 

Most of all it meant freedom from IBM, which at the time had a strict corporate culture and a record of ethics-free service to government — even the government of Germany in the 1930s.  

Apple was supposed to be above all that, and these days, historians often lead us to believe that it was.  The usual celebrations of Apple Corp., and Steve Jobs gloss over the wretched stuff — the Foxconn suicides,  the the dictatorial tantrums, his astonishingly selfish family life.

However, it was the open source liberated computing movement with Ted Nelson, Richard Stallman,  Bill Joy and others who really changed computing.  The Unix operating system and the Apache web server, among many others, are fundamental to the way networks operate today. Without them, computer users would be paying much more for the privilege of getting online, and the prospect of an open World Wide Web would have been foreclosed.      

Most of the articles about the Apple 1984 ad focus on the ad’s style, not its message of liberation.

A Feb. 9, 2024 NY Times article on the anniversary of the ad features interviews with director Ridley Scott; John Sculley, Apple; Steve Hayden, a copy writer; Fred Goldberg, the Apple account manager; and Anya Rajah, the actor who famously threw the sledgehammer. (Little known fact: The hammer was paper mache).

Other videos about the ad include:

The real story behind Apple’s  Famous 1984 Ad (Bloomberg)

 

The Genius Story of Apple “1984”  (the young adult version)

There’s even NFL’s take on how the ad changed Super Bowl advertising, although you have to watch it on YouTube, not here.

 

 

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