I’m a bit late to the party on this one, unfortunately, but the Macintosh turned 21 years old today.
Even better, there’s one heck of a birthday present to the Mac community out on the ‘net now: the long-lost video of the original introduction of the Mac by Steve Jobs.
21 years ago today, on January 24th 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh. And we’ve seen that 1984 wasn’t like 1984.
What we’ve never seen indeed, was the big day itself. Lots of historic stuff has been preserved – images, texts, even sounds, and the saga has been told on and on. However only very few people have actually seen how Steve Jobs pulls the first Mac out of this bag, how the Mac introduces itself to the public, Steves biggest grin ever, and how he is obviously overwhelmed by this moment in the Cupertino Flint Center.
Fear not, faithful Mac believers. We have found it. We have found what seems to be the only copy of a public TV broadcast on that very day. It was recorded and preserved by Scott Knaster, the “legendary Mac hacker”, as Amazon puts it. Scott kept the tape (a NTSC Betamax III longplay) for 21 years since he keeps everything. Andy Hertzfeld saw it when he wrote the story ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’‘ on folklore.org. From there we followed the hints, and that’s how we found it.
We worked with Scott to convert it from NTSC to PAL, we’ve polished it, cleaned it, huged it and digitzed it. Here it is. It goes back to the people who’ve made the Macintosh, and to the world. The complete material of about 2 hours is returned to Scott, Andy and the folklore.org people, and this weblog will report the story of the “missing 1984 video” in detail. We’ll release other clips in the coming days, so bookmark and check back.
But now, Ladies and Gentlemen: please welcome – the 1984 Macintosh introduction video. A travel back in time…
(via MeFi)
“Gimme Shelter” by Sisters of Mercy, The from the album Some Girls Wander By Mistake (1983, 5:58).