Today marks the 21st anniversary of the introduction of the Macintosh, which was launched on January 24, 1984 accompanied by the now famous Ridley Scott directed Super Bowl commercial. I remember this vaguely - I was only 13 at the time, after all. Our first family computer was an Apple ][+ we used to play Breakout and Castle Wolfenstein on, so we were familiar with the Apple name.
To celebrate this milestone, TextLab has posted a video to their weblog of Steve Jobs introducing the Macintosh to Apple shareholders from that day:
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.
They’ve been looking for people to mirror the video as their servers are getting massacred (they got Slashdotted, c|net’ed, and linked to by pretty much every Mac fan boy out there), and who am I to resist?
So, here it is: a very young-looking Steven P. Jobs introducing the Macintosh. Chariots of Fire never sounded so good.
