You would be hard pressed to find someone who really cares about computer history, or that of Apple, who isn’t aware of the “1984” commercial announcing the Macintosh.
Directed by Ridley Scott (of Alien fame) the commercial depicts a dystopian future where a “Big Brother” figure, displayed on a massive screen, talks to a mass of virtually identical “drone” people about their unity and their success over anything else, and the benefits of “being one.”
A woman runs into the the hall where the speech is happening carrying a hammer and wearing vibrantly colored clothing, including a shirt with the “Picasso” Macintosh artwork on it. She’s chased by guards who clearly want her stopped. Upon entering the hall she throws the hammer into the screen, destroying it in an explosion of bright light and smoke.
Then came the text crawl with the only direct reference to what the advertisement is even about:
“On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”
Honestly, if it didn’t end with that text, you wouldn’t have a clue what you just watched even was. However, with that text, it all becomes obvious.
The Macintosh was a sleeper project at Apple – something cooked up on the side that was never really supposed to be anything major, or at least, that’s how the story goes. When Steve Jobs was kicked from the Lisa project he took the Macintosh and made it everything Lisa was to be, and then some. This was in the time frame when IBM was making its push into the personal computer scene and were seen as a threat to not just Apple, but to the “personal” aspect of the computer scene. The Orwellian analogy regarding the year 1984 may have been a bit extreme, but from the perspective of those people who just over half a decade before had ushered in the era of the personal computer, the threat to the very essence of the industry, as they saw it at that time, was very real.
The symbolism is well documented, and obvious — if not from the ad itself, from the speech that Steve Jobs gave during the launch of the Macintosh which discussed how IMB “wants it all” and how Apple and its user base were not going to allow this to happen.
Of course, 35 years later we all know how the PC wars went, with the IBM-PC standard becoming dominant and of all the computer makers of the 80’s that had unique systems and standards, that only Apple would survive, and just barely at that, and even now their machines are more like an IBM-PC than the Macintosh of 1984. Indeed, many would say, rightfully so I think, that Apple has become in many ways the very thing that this commercial was against 35 years ago. Something about “living long enough to see yourself become the villain” comes to mind here, but I digress…
I could go on and on on this subject, but not here. Not now. Maybe in the future. For now, the 1984 commercial in all its glory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement)
Oh, and one more thing… “hey, we were watching that!” 😉