John B. Marek is a writer, farmer, outdoorsman and recovering economic developer. You can find his books at johnbmarek.com.
The window on the mountain is closed today. It’s a little warmer than it’s been the past week, but it’s still winter-like in the High Country. On a brighter note, the first of my seed starts went under the grow lights this weekend, so I guess spring can’t be that far off.
Forty years and two days ago, Jan. 22, 1984, during a commercial break in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, the world was introduced to the Apple Macintosh. The ad was a takeoff on George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.” It showed a lone runner, presumably representing Apple, throwing a hammer through the “Big Brother” screen as thousands of identically gray-clad onlookers sat in stunned amazement. Against the backdrop of the exploding screen, the words “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”
The spot aired only once and is widely considered one of the best television commercials of the 20th century. A strong case can be made that much of the way we live and work today, for better and for worse, can be tied back to that 60 seconds tucked between plays of a not-very-compelling (the score at the time was 35-9) football game.
Apple Computer was founded in 1976 and by January 1984 it had grown into one of the most successful “personal” computer manufacturers. The personal computer market at the time was primarily comprised of hobbyists who used them to write code for simple text-based applications, as well as schools and other educational users. There was little reason for the average person to own a computer, and the learning curve, which involved understanding dozens of text commands, was daunting.
Business computing, on the other hand, was almost exclusively the realm of IBM, whose mainframe systems were expensive, difficult to install and maintain, and required their users to work in a rigid, standardized way. They were the “Big Brother” the Apple commercial referenced.
As a student at Bowling Green State University, I’d had the opportunity to use an Apple IIc, a model that predated the Macintosh, for a class in fall 1983 and was looking forward to getting my hands on a Mac. The school was an Apple test site, so the Mac Lab, a 20-foot by 20-foot room in the library with a dozen Macs on desks along three of the walls, opened the day the computers hit the market. There was a waiting list, so it was a couple of weeks before I got to try one out. When the day came, I signed in and was handed a cassette tape and three 3.5-inch floppy disks. The tape contained a 15-minute tutorial. It was assumed in those days that every college student had a Walkman to play it on. The early Macs did not have a hard drive, so all the software was contained on the three disks.
The start-up process went something like this: You turned the computer on and were prompted to put the “System” disk in the disk drive. The Mac loaded the operating system from the disk, and your “desktop” appeared on the screen. Today, we don’t think anything of a graphic interface with icons for different programs and folders for storing files, but at the time, it was astonishing. Having said that, there were really only two programs available: “Write” and “Paint.” After “clicking” on either icon using the “mouse,” another incredible innovation, you were prompted to insert the appropriate disk into the drive, and the application program loaded. Keep in mind this was on a black-and-white screen about the size of an iPad, and the disks each stored 720 kilobytes. For reference, downloading just one color picture from your iPhone would require a shoebox full of those disks.
The Write program was a fairly basic word processor, not all that different from the one I’d used on the Apple IIc, but the Paint program was completely new. You could use the mouse to draw simple shapes that appeared on the screen in real time and “color” them in. Moreover, you could insert your drawing into a word processing file, although that required a significant disk-swapping operation that took a few minutes. I walked out of the Mac Lab that day feeling like I had glimpsed the future.
About a month later, I had a paper due for a marketing class and decided to try to write it on the Mac. By then, the novelty had worn off, and getting a slot on the Mac Lab schedule wasn’t difficult. The assignment was to write a marketing plan for a fictitious taco brand. I drew up a couple of very cheesy print ads featuring my best shot at a taco in Paint and included them. Between the iffy drawing capability and the 9-pin dot-matrix printer, the finished paper looked like something produced by a toddler on an Etch A Sketch. Still, apparently, my professor was as amazed by the technology as I was because I got an A.
Looking back on my first experience with a Mac and contrasting it with the MacBook I’m writing this post on today, it would be pretty easy to conclude that the vision of the 1984 commercial has been fully realized. But has it?
The 1984 Apple commercial envisioned a future where personal computing would liberate individuals from conformity and usher in an era of creative and personal freedom. However, the realization of this vision has taken a different trajectory. While personal computing has advanced, the promised freedom has been compromised by the pervasive influence of social media, artificial intelligence and technology consolidation. Instead of fostering independent thinking and empowerment, social media platforms often contribute to echo chambers and the spread of misinformation. The omnipresence of AI, although transformative, has raised concerns about privacy and ethical implications, and the concentration of this technology among a handful of megacorporations is troubling to many.
In essence, the original vision of the 1984 commercial has encountered challenges in the face of evolving technologies, raising legitimate questions about the true nature of freedom in the digital age and begging the question, is Big Brother just Big Tech in a different suit?