One of the world’s best loved technology companies has decided to celebrate the birthday of a product that helped set the pace for the world of personal computers with a video, and one that shows how its technology exists in so much of what we do today.
Thirty years ago, in 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, one of the world’s first consumer friendly computers that, according to the company, promised to put the power of technology into the hands of everyone.
The original Macintosh is very different from the computers of today, what with the the 8MHz processor, 128kB of memory, floppy drive, and monochromatic low-resolution screen, but it allowed the first generation of personal computers to come home.
Apple celebrated the released of the Macintosh with an advertisement directed by Ridley Scott, the director behind “Blade Runner” and “Alien,” which suggested that one company wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) dominate the computing landscape, and that Apple could be the hope to give people more choice, and to put that technology into the hands of more people.
Thirty years later, in 2014, Apple has pretty much done what it originally said it would, with that first Macintosh computer allowing the company to eventually push forward into computing with more personal computers, workstations, and eventually into media players, phones and tablets.
This push into so many aspects of consumer technology has made it possible to put computing power into the hands of everybody, and practically everyone has played with an Apple gadget at one point in time.
And with so much technology in the hands of customers, Apple has decided to make a video showing just what its technology can do, filming everyone on 100 iPhones over the course of a single day in 15 locations around the world.
While the clip doesn’t quite have the dark feel that Ridley Scott tried to get across in the 1984 ad, it does play homage to the original, by grabbing Ridley’s son Jake Scott to direct it.
Apple tells us there were over 70 hours of footage for the video, with 86 Macs used in the making, and 46 iPads used by the crew, all based on one day thirty years from when the first Macintosh came out.
Without that first Macintosh, none of this would have been possible, though, and it’s likely that technology would have evolved in a very, very different way.
