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The Horrifying Apple Super Bowl Ad That Time Forgot, 1985
- tosseraccount 13y agoThe irony is, the IBM PC was a very open machine. The Apple folks were the secretive ones.
- giantrobothead 13y agoYou say "were" as though that has somehow changed.
- mattl 13y agoDo you have the source code to the BIOS now? http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/ http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/
- J_Darnley 13y agoNo and it's a damn shame. I would have liked to be able to update the version of memtest that was bundled into the BIOS for my previous motherboard.
- giantrobothead 13y agoNo, but that link is definitely intriguing.
- userbinator 13y ago> The only thing not working is changing the screen brightness, which stays fixed at 100%. That would be enough to stop me from buying one. I have an X60 already (and found the schematics online), maybe it wouldn't be too hard to fix.
- mattl 13y agoYeah, I bet you could add in a dial and control the resistance, but yeah... not in software.
- greenyoda 13y agoVery open indeed. The Technical Reference Manual for the PC actually included circuit diagrams and the source code for the BIOS. Here's the version from the PC/XT (warning: huge PDF file): http://www.retroarchive.org/dos/docs/ibm5160techref.pdf http://www.retroarchive.org/dos/docs/ibm5160techref.pdf
- userbinator 13y agoHere's the AT one, it was the last one that was open in that way (and closest to what the modern PC is based on): http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/pc/at/1502494_PC_AT_Technical_Reference_Mar84.pdf http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/pc/at/1502494_PC_... It's an even bigger PDF than the XT one :)
- gaius 13y agoSpecifically the Mac folks -the Apple ][ folks valued openness.
- angkec 13y agoReminds me of the Pink Floyd MTV The Wall. Where lines of students followed each other into a meat process machine.
- unpointfulness 13y agoI don't understand. In what way was that ad "horrifying"?
- jamesbritt 13y agoMight be the whole mass-death thing.
- kayoone 13y agoit might be controversial, but horrifying ?
- 300bps 13y agoSome people find portrayals of mass suicide by jumping off a cliff horrifying.
- Theodores 13y agoThe tone of this advert was not that different to the big government advertising campaigns of the era, whether they be warnings about AIDS, drink driving, not locking up your house or buying shares in a once government owned utility. When viewed in that context it is not that out of the ordinary, and it was probably put together by the same fear-mongering creatives that worked on the government campaigns. I was wondering what the Mapple Office product was, wondering if it meant Word was out on a Mac, but no, they meant the fileserver plus printer. Wasn't it Canon that actually made the printer?
- fredoralive 13y agoWasn't it Canon that actually made the printer? The internals at least, the original Laserwriter used the same Canon LBP-CX print engine as the original HP LaserJet. Both had unique control hardware / software, and somewhat different cases. Quite a lot of printers seem to share the same Canon guts: http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/reference/pcr/engine/1311 http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/reference/pcr/engine/1311
- userbinator 13y agoThose ads are a little ironic, considering Apple's design philosophy now.
- csmithuk 13y agoWell they got the office market share projected right! (yes this is sarcastic).
- JacobIrwin 13y agoWho has forgotten about this?? It's probably in the top three of all-time most memorable Super Bowl commercials. Not a fan of this luring/phishy title..
- mscarborough 13y agoI'd never seen or heard about it before. I think it has been overshadowed in pop culture history by the 1984 ad the year before.
- bsaul 13y agoI can't imagine what it feels like to witness first row a whole stadium being dead silent by an ad that you designed ( or at least were involved with). Even for someone like steve jobs, that must have been really painfull.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoVery dystopian and moody. I've never seen an ad so dark.
- sjtrny 13y agoCome over to Australia or New Zealand. Our PSAs tend to be dark and in your face eg http://youtu.be/ZgkwYyPUMsU http://youtu.be/ZgkwYyPUMsU and http://youtu.be/bvLaTupw-hk http://youtu.be/bvLaTupw-hk
- jimhart3000 13y agoHa! I saw this one linked on Kotaku the other day and thought it was awesome. Part of me wishes we had spots like this in the USA, and the other part of me is happy we're not all scarred for life.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STHpMUYeznQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STHpMUYeznQ
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoWell, I'm okay with those ads. They are just the real deal. The Apple ad, on the other hand, is pure fantasy, but uncomfortably creepy.
- barrkel 13y agoIt shows the deep roots smugness has in Apple culture.
- leoc 13y agoActually Apple's advertisers, Chiat/Day, pushed them into running "Lemmings": neither Jobs nor Sculley was particularly happy with it. And to be fair, when Chiat/Day made "1984" Jobs had loved it but the rest of the Apple board hadn't liked it and had wanted to cancel it. (Source: Isaacson's /Steve Jobs/.) Another example of what Nigel Tufnell observed about cleverness...
- chris_wot 13y agoJohn Sculley said the same thing in "From Pepsi to Apple".
- jkaljundi 13y agoBoth this one and 1984 ad could be made into great spoof ads about Mac and iPhone users today. How the world has changed.
- mratzloff 13y agoIf you're reversing roles, it would make Apple haters the smug ones...
- mattl 13y agohttp://static.fsf.org/nosvn/stickers/DBD-Sticker_002-jmt.svg http://static.fsf.org/nosvn/stickers/DBD-Sticker_002-jmt.svg CC-BY-SA if you want to reuse.
- fhars 13y agoAre you talking about this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUl1DFBKdv8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUl1DFBKdv8
- InclinedPlane 13y agoIt's easy to forget how many missteps Apple made at the time and how easy it was for the company to push Steve Jobs out the door.
- coldcode 13y agoCriticizing a commercial from 1985 as being representative of anything Apple is doing today is a little much. Sure it sucked but it was memorably sucky. How many squeeze the charm in ads are still talked about?
- w1ntermute 13y agoWell if an ad from 1985 is not representative of today's Apple, then people should also stop praising the 1984 ad, since that is also not representative.
- wtracy 13y agoWhen the announces announces "The Macintosh Office", the implication at first seems to be that the people buying the Macintosh Office are the lemmings jumping off a cliff. Terrible messaging all around.
- shinratdr 13y agoEasily one of my favorites. Comments about it are painfully predictable and get split into two basic camps. People try and read all types of bullshit about current Apple into it, and those who make the very simplistic underdogs/countercultrualists-turned-authoritarians observation. However, for those who simply take it for what it is, it's genuinely creepy which is so unusual for advertising. Strange creepy you get every so often, but scary/dark creepy is pretty rare in advertising. With the obvious exception of scared straight PSAs and political ads. Rarely does a business trying to simply sell you a product take such a freaky approach. Sorry, I'll let you return to your glib observations and poorly thought out conclusions about Apple users, "Apple culture" and whatnot.
- testrun 13y agoTalking about glib observations....
- jonheller 13y agoI don't understand all the irony people keep pointing too. The point as I understand it is that people were miserable using the business products of that day. Nowadays you could make an argument that people are lemmings for using Apple products just for the sake of them being Apple products, but judging from both anecdotes and high customer satisfaction ratings, I highly doubt the majority of Apple product users are miserable with their iPhones etc.