by Forty years ago this week, on January 22, 1984, a great advertising video was shown during the Super Bowl broadcast in the USA. Ridley Scott directed and portrayed the dystopian atmosphere in Orwell’s Nineteen Fourteen. Long lines of gray-haired zombies in lockstep march through a tunnel into a huge amphitheater, where they sit in rows snaking up to a screen on which an authoritative figure sings a message. “Today, we celebrate the glorious centenary of the information purification directives,” drones said. “We have created a garden of pure ideology for the first time ever.
The camera then pans to a young woman carrying a sledgehammer, hotly pursued by sinister police in riot gear. Just as Big Brother reaches his dream, “Our enemies will talk themselves to death, and we will bury them in their own confusion. We will prevail!” She swung the hammer at the big screen, which exploded in a flurry of light and smoke, leaving the zombies open-mouthed in shock. And then the money comes, scroll up the screen: “On January 24 , Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’.”
Chutzpah doesn’t get better than that. January 1984 was full of reflection on Orwell’s novel. And there was a time when the personal computer was pushed out of the “hobby” world and into the real world with the arrival of the IBM PC. IBM was then the Big Brother of the industry. He made computers for adults: men in suits, accountants with MBAs, not a wiggly tail in sight. How could a machine made by an upstart company challenge such an entrenched monopoly?
With the 40th anniversary approaching, the web is full of memories of people’s first encounter with the Mac. I remember mine vividly and have just unearthed my notes of the day. The venue was a conference suite in a hotel in Cambridge, with tables covered in green baize. After an initial spiel by Apple representatives we were let loose on the machines. “For some inexplicable reason,” I noted, “each one was set up showing a drawing of a fish. It was actually a MacPaint file. I remember staring at the image, marveling at the way the scales and fins were so clearly etched on the screen. After a while I picked up courage, clicked on the “lasso” tool and selected a fin with it. The lasso suddenly began to shimmer. I held down the mouse button and moved it gently. The fin started moving across the screen!“
Sounds naive, doesn’t it? But it was also a kind of epiphany. I remember thinking this is how it has to be. I felt what Douglas Adams described to technology journalist Steven Levy as “that kind of roaring, tingling, floating feeling” that characterized his first MacPaint experience. Many others have reported similar epiphanies.
The moment you entered design and publishing departments, Macs were everywhere
In reality, that first Macintosh was expensive (£5,700 in today’s money), underpowered, with too little memory for the tasks it could do. It needed a hard disk to accommodate the fact that it could only take one floppy disk. But with its (moderately, for the time) high-resolution screen it sent a key message that was widely discussed: that computers didn’t have to be just lines of green text on a black screen. They could handle graphics. That meant they could do layouts, illustrations, use different fonts, even something as disruptive as “desktop publishing”. What you saw on the screen is what you got on the printer. And you didn’t need a PhD in computer science to use it productively.
Commercially, the Mac was initially a disappointment. But he had a significant impact on the world nonetheless. One saw this in companies and organizations all over the place. Executives and office staff had IBM PCs. But the moment you entered design and publishing departments, Macs (and from 1985, LaserWriter printers) were everywhere. And eventually, all personal computers came to use the Wimp interface (windows, icons, menus, pointer) that the Macintosh, er, borrowed from Xerox Parc researchers and adapted to a cute little machine. So, even if you’re using Windows 11, you’re still in the interface that made the Macintosh popular.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t regular cultural wars between the Macintosh and IBM PC tribes. The Mac has always been a closed system at risk. The computer was always quite open. As a result of this, Umberto Eco, in a memoir essay, argued that the Macintosh is Catholic and the PC is Protestant. The church of the Son of God tells the faithful how they must go step by step to reach the kingdom of heaven – if the kingdom of heaven is not printed – when their document is printed”. In contrast, the PC is “Protestant, or even Calvinist. It allows for a free interpretation of scripture, requires difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics on the user, and takes for granted the idea that not everyone can find salvation”. So the next time you call the IT support guy about a problem with Windows 11, say you’re a Protestant and you’ll get a sympathetic hearing.
What I was reading
This is a picture
The inside story of Josef Koudelka’s career. Transcript of an interview with the author of a “visual biography” of one of the world’s greatest photographers.
Trust me, I’m a banker
Davos duality. Robert Reich’s scathing blog post on snowballed hypocrisy at the World Economic Forum.
Behind the curtain
Letter 2023 Dan Wang. One of the highlights of the year by an extremely astute China watcher on his own website.
