But so much about the Mac and the splash that it made was fuelled by marketing and hype. Jason Scott, a filmmaker and historian of technology who works at the digital archive non-profit Internet Archive, remembers seeing the original TV ad for the Mac 128K as a teenager. The bizarre short film was directed by Ridley Scott and depicted a dystopian future inspired by the novel 1984. What would save us all from that dark future? The Mac 128K, of course.
“That commercial began playing and it seemed like it was completely from Mars,” recalls Scott. “Something was going on but I didn’t quite understand it.”
Not long after, when Scott tried a Macintosh for the first time, he was enraptured. It was, he says, like looking through a telescope to another world.
And yet the Mac was not as big a success as some expected. “It didn’t sell to businesspeople like Steve thought it would,” remembers Andy Cunningham, who worked on the marketing campaign for the device. “It’s ultimately why Steve got fired from Apple.” Jobs left in 1985 but returned to the company in the late 1990s.
It took until 1988 before Apple had sold enough Macintosh devices, including various subsequent iterations of the original Macintosh, to finally eclipse sales of the Apple II, which had come out way back in 1977.
But Macs did appeal to many, especially young people and those working in creative roles.
Cunningham and her colleague Jane Anderson helped to pump up hype over the original Macintosh by offering individual journalists six hours each with people at Apple, including Jobs, and giving them multiple demonstrations of the machine to ensure that they understood what they were writing about. “I watched them all play with this computer and their eyes just glistened,” says Cunningham.
It would be wrong to suggest that the Mac 128K was a perfect computer. As mentioned, it had severe limitations and was hardly a commercial hit at first. But it left an indelible mark. The rise of personal computing was undoubtedly a watershed moment. The ridiculously oversized, cabinet-like computers that you could only plug into via a clunky terminal now seemed hopelessly antiquated. Now we had portable, cheerful, accessible machines that almost anyone could use.
Funnily enough, the era of individualised computing heralded by the original Macintosh is, in one sense, coming to an end. In the 21st Century, we are becoming ever more dependent on server farms, cloud processing, big data, and networked systems. Other people’s computers are increasingly indispensable for running our own.
“We are now on the other side,” reflects Blatner, who has kept almost every Macintosh he ever bought. “We did need this 40-year period of enabling people, of empowering people.”
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