The Real Story Behind Apple's Famous '1984' Super Bowl Ad
February 3, 2015 6:43 AM   Subscribe

 
Truly a great ad, but more of a promise than a warning.
posted by Poldo at 7:28 AM on February 3, 2015


I'll never get to watch this video because I died in an accident.
posted by fungible at 7:31 AM on February 3, 2015 [11 favorites]


One of the very few times I was ever completely dumbstruck by something on television.

As were the 30 or so other people with me.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 9:01 AM on February 3, 2015


I saw that ad! Yeah, I'm an old guy....

But the take then for many of us was that it was Gates on the screen, not IBM. And it was the gray command-line MS-DOS people being dictated to in that room....
posted by CrowGoat at 9:25 AM on February 3, 2015


Is there a transcript?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:48 AM on February 3, 2015


1984 will not be 1984.

We mostly held out until 2001 so it was better than nothing I suppose.
posted by bukvich at 9:55 AM on February 3, 2015




Wow, that article. The next big thing, obviously, is going to be WebObjects!
posted by RustyBrooks at 10:39 AM on February 3, 2015


This ad somehow got spliced into the previews at the beginning of the print of the Rocky Horror Picture Show that got shown in Ann Arbor. That's where I saw it, over and over at the midnight movies in the mid 80s. All that drama, spiked with blips that might be part of it or just bad tape splices, and the whole thing ending with a huge glurpy tape splice instead of any brand names, slogans, or words. It was just inexplicable and weird and eery as hell. All the other previews on that crumbling print of Rocky were for long gone movies. I assumed this too was a preview and wondered about it, idly.

I only found out it was an Apple ad by seeing an article about it and feeling a flash or recognition, within the last few years. Yes, I am culturally illiterate.
posted by elizilla at 10:50 AM on February 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


There's some more detail here on folklore.org.

1984
posted by lagomorphius at 11:11 AM on February 3, 2015


> But the take then for many of us was that it was Gates on the screen

It's possible you were more prescient than most.

Microsoft was a giant at this point, poised to dominate personal computing for the next twenty years, but it was not yet the clear existential threat to Apple's fortunes as they eventually came to be seen. Bill Gates was still a grinning skinny 28-year-old startup kid, just like the two Steves, and his company and Jobs' were downright chummy, at least outwardly: Microsoft BASIC was on every Apple II; Microsoft was writing brand-new Mac versions of Word, Multiplan, and Chart for the debut of the Mac. Remember at this time, MicroPro's WordStar was the leading word processor; Lotus 123, introduced a year prior, was overtaking VisiCalc as the dominant spreadsheet. Windows 1.0 wouldn't be released for nearly another two years, in late 1985. Windows 3.0, which ushered the shift of "the rest" of personal computing to a graphical user interface, was still six years away. Microsoft achieved their truly fearsome juggernaut status much later than January 1984, after PC clones ate away at IBM's business, and Microsoft emerged as *the* platform. At the time "1984" aired, Microsoft was still duking it out for a space at the table set by the hardware companies.

The target of the ad at the time was unambiguously IBM, whose unimaginatively named "Personal Computer," had recently in August of 1983 surpassed sales of Apple II computers. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM," the saying went at the time, and the cultures of those two companies, their geographic opposition, everything about them seemed diametrically opposed.
posted by scelerat at 2:18 PM on February 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I think someone is backdating their memories. At the time, Microsoft was a partner with Apple, and there was a joint announcement in conjunction with the Macintosh release. It wasn't until Microsoft came out with Windows that they and Apple began competition in earnest.

The fact was that many PCs were sold in the early days simply to run Visicalc -- and later Lotus 1-2-3, and WordPerfect. Apple really, really needed Microsoft applications like Multiplan/Excel for the Macintosh to succeed, and they were especially sensitive to this in early sales materials, insisting that there were hundreds of third-party applications available.

If you look at company size, in 1984 IBM had something like $40B in revenue, Apple was around $1.6B, and Microsoft was closing in on $100M (double that of the year before!). I'm not even sure I would call it a "giant" quite yet. IBM had been part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average for half a century at that point (since 1932). Microsoft wouldn't make it there until 1999, and hadn't even had its IPO yet. (Of course, Apple has famously resisted inclusion, in part by keeping its per-share stock price ridiculously high, but speculation is currently rife that the Dow may boot IBM to finally add APL.)
posted by dhartung at 5:24 PM on February 3, 2015


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