Electric Dreams Chapter Five: Apple’s “1984”

 

From an emphasis on technology in the previous chapter, this chapter turns to the initial marketing of this new product, the personal computer. How did fledgling PC companies attempt to define a product that had never before existed? How did marketers engage and redirect the available visions of computing? Why would anybody buy one of these bizarre new devices? We will trace the changing promotional strategies of personal computer manufacturers from the “invention” of the PC in the mid-1970s to its firm establishment as a mass-produced consumer item in the mid-1980s. We’ll zoom in on what was undoubtedly the single most influential personal computer advertisement: the award-winning “1984” ad, which introduced the Apple Macintosh computer to an audience of 96 million viewers[1] during the 1984 Super Bowl.

Apple II and VisiCalc

Before we get to 1984, let’s look at the years between the Altair and the Mac. The commodification of computing in the form of the PC made information processing available for the first time to millions of potential consumers. Following the success of the Altair, a number of other small computer manufacturers started up, selling to the growing hobbyist market. Not until the Apple II, however, did a computer emerge which reached a broader consumer base.

Apple Computer was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Jobs was a brilliant salesmen, Wozniak a talented engineer interested in designing PCs for users without the technical skills of the hobbyists. Their first product, the Apple I, was released later that year. A custom-built product in a wooden case, it sold only a few copies.

The Apple II was a much slicker package. In one molded-plastic box, it gave a beginner everything needed to begin computing. The Apple II was released in 1977. The following chart shows its subsequent diffusion:[2]

Year          Total Users

1977                       570

1978                    8,170

1979                  43,270

1980                121,370

1981                301,370

1982                580,370

1983             1,000,000

1984             2,000,000

Stan Veit, the founder of one of the first stores for personal computers in the wake of the Altair’s success, recalls,

The Apple II changed the entire business. No longer did solder iron wielding techies hang out at our store – the Apples came completely built and ready to run. . . . The Apple users were much more oriented toward software and graphic applications. They were more interested in what a computer did than how it did it.[3]

What users were interested in doing, more than anything else, was to use a new kind of computer program: VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. Written by Dan Bricklin and Robert Frankston, VisiCalc was a combination of a calculator and a ledger sheet, allowing financial planners to create complex documents composed of interlocking mathematical relationships. VisiCalc exploited the interactive properties of computing, allowing users to explore a range of financial scenarios by just changing just one or two variables.

In the language of the computer industry, VisiCalc was the first “killer application,” a software program so compelling it inspired consumers to buy computers just to run it. (Subsequent killer apps include word processing, desktop publishing, and, more recently, email and web browsing.) Released in October 1979, VisiCalc sold 200,000 copies in two years.[4] Only available for the Apple II, it caused an explosion in Apple II sales. As Veit recalls, “The Apple disk system was priced within everyone’s price range, and soon there was a lot of very useful software for it, led by VisiCalc, the most important program. Businessmen would come into the store to buy ‘A VisiCalc Machine’ and that’s all they used it for.”[5]

VisiCalc exploited the unique interactive qualities of computer software much as computer games do. Bricklin’s original model for the program, in fact, was a computer game. Computer industry journalist Robert X. Cringely writes,

What  Bricklin really wanted was . . . a kind of very advanced calculator with a heads-up display similar to the weapons system controls on an F-14 fighter. Like Luke Skywalker jumping into the turret of the Millennium Falcon, Bricklin saw himself blasting out financials, locking onto profit and loss numbers that would appear suspended in space before him. It was to be a business tool cum video game, a Saturday Night Special for M.B.A.s, only the hardware technology didn’t exist in those days to make it happen.[6]

So Bricklin settled for the metaphor of a sheet of rows and columns instead of a fighter cockpit.

The IBM PC and the Rise of Microsoft

In August 1981, the world’s largest computer company finally responded to the personal computer boom when IBM introduced its own personal computer. The IBM PC was an immediate success, selling out distributors and pushing the company to ramp up production far beyond initial plans. In 1981, IBM sold 35,000 PCs. In 1983, they sold 800,000, making the IBM PC the most popular computer in the world.[7]

IBM’s entry into the PC market legitimized the machine for many conservative corporate purchasers skeptical about personal computers and wary of smaller, less established suppliers. As industry wags put it, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” IBM’s entry also helped establish technical standards for an industry still very much in flux. Instead of making competing, incompatible devices, many manufacturers began producing IBM-compatible peripherals and software. [8] More problematically for IBM, companies also began developing IBM-compatible “clones,” lower-priced PCs reverse-engineered for complete compatibility with all IBM PC hardware and software.[9]

In order to catch up with the rapid pace of the PC industry, IBM ditched its traditional product development strategy in designing their personal computer. Normally, developing a new product at IBM took three years. One reason for the slow pace was that IBM preferred to manufacture all parts in-house, to capture as much of the profits as possible. The IBM PC, by contrast, went from conception to store shelves in only one year.[10] IBM managed this feat by outsourcing much of the development, bringing in parts and software from outside vendors.

One component IBM outsourced, to its everlasting chagrin, was the underlying software which allowed programs to function: the operating system. At the time, this didn’t seem distinctly important – no more, say, than the Intel microprocessor or the Zenith power supply. And so, IBM ended up licensing its Disc Operating System from a small software company named Microsoft. Microsoft actually didn’t have the resources to develop the software itself, either – instead, it bought the rights to MS-DOS from a local software company, Seattle Computer Products, for $30,000.[11]

Microsoft received a royalty of between $10 and $50 for every computer sold with its software installed.[12] It was the revenue and leverage provided by this arrangement that allowed Microsoft to become the dominant company in the computer industry within a decade. IBM’s market share and profit margins were quickly squeezed by low-cost clone makers such as Compaq and Dell.[13] MS-DOS, on the other hand, was needed not just to run an IBM PC, but any “IBM-compatible” PC. PC hardware turned out to be a commodity business, in which competition among multiple producers of interchangeable, easily-copied products drives prices into the ground.[14] Software was where the real profit margins lay. The only computer company to successfully buck this development was Apple, which in 1984 introduced a new piece of hardware which contained proprietary software – the Macintosh Operating System – miles beyond anything available for the IBM-compatible PC.

Early PC Ads

VisiCalc and the Apple II launched the personal computer industry as a multi-billion dollar segment of the American economy. With this economic clout came access, through advertising and public relations, to the American public sphere. PC companies hoped to reshape public perceptions about computing. Marketers had the chance to counter the suspicions evident in Desk Set and 2001 by popularizing the technotopian vision of the Homebrew Computer Company and Ted Nelson – a new vision of computing as decentralized, democratic, and empowering. This transformation, in turn, might expand the PC market beyond spreadsheet users, inspire the development of new killer apps,[15] and make the PC as ubiquitous in American households as the television.

But the shadow of HAL hovered over early PC advertising. Marketers shied away from any SF-style bold promises of the future, fearing that when Americans thought of computers and science fiction, they would think of 2001. Instead, companies bent over backwards to reassure consumers that computers were simple, unthreatening devices. This was why IBM’s advertising agency, Chiat/Day, ran as far in the other direction as they could, associating the IBM PC with the quaint struggles of Charlie Chaplin. Campbell-Kelly and Aspray write,

[IBM’s] market research revealed that although the personal computer was perceived as a good thing, it was also seen as intimidating – and IBM itself was seen as “cold and aloof.” The Chiat Day campaign attempted to allay these fears by featuring in its advertisements a Charlie Chaplin lookalike and alluding to Chaplin’s famous movie Modern Times. Set in a futuristic automated factory, Modern Times showed the “little man” caught up in a world of hostile technology, confronting it, and eventually overcoming it. The Charlie Chaplin figure reduced the intimidation factor and gave IBM “a human face.”[16]

Rewriting the story of the dystopian Modern Times to give it a Desk Set-style happy ending was an act of astounding gall, but judging from the IBM PC sales, it was quite successful.

Apple’s early print campaigns for the Apple II looked back even further: one ad starred Thomas Jefferson, another Benjamin Franklin. The ads that first introduced Apple to most consumers were self-consciously non-threatening: they starred Dick Cavett giving self-deprecating testimonials to the power of the Apple II. Later campaigns centered around what were called “lifestyle” ads, in which attractive yuppies – including a young Kevin Costner – make their lives easier and more productive with Apple computers. None of these innocuous early spots attempted to communicate the broader California vision of the liberating possibility of personal computing.

Introducing the Macintosh

By 1983, Apple had reached annual sales of over $1 billion.[17] But its spot as the PC market leader was in jeopardy, thanks to the brisk sales of the IBM PC. Apple’s first attempt at a next-generation product that could re-establish the company’s pre-eminence was the Lisa. A $10,000 computer designed for the business market, it was a flop. The Macintosh was a streamlined version of the Lisa, rushed out by Jobs’s development team in the wake of the Lisa debacle. It was built to be compact, relatively affordable, and easy to use. Jobs hyped it as “the people’s computer.” It was designed to look not like an imposing piece of machinery, but an “information appliance.” In its sleek, inviting shape, it bore the influence of another high-tech product of the early 1980s: the Cuisinart food processor.

What made the Macintosh and Lisa different from previous commercially available personal computers was a new technological feature: the mouse. The point-and-click interface replaced the cumbersome command-line text interface with an intuitive, elegant means of interaction.[18] The mouse was first developed by Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s,[19] and perfected by researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s.[20] Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC in the late 1970s and was amazed by the Alto, its prototype mouse-based computer. But Xerox never committed to developing a commercial version of the Alto, and so it was left to Apple to introduce the world to the mouse.

One might presume that the mouse was such a brilliant idea that it was inevitable the Mac would succeed. But keep in mind that the Lisa, the first PC with a mouse, failed. Many computer industry insiders dismissed the mouse as a toy, a gimmick nobody could ever take seriously. This attitude persisted even after the initial success of the Mac. As software usability expert Jacob Neilsen writes,

In 1986, I asked a group of 57 computer professionals to predict the biggest change in user interfaces by the year 2000. The top answer was speech I/O, which got twice as many votes as graphical user interfaces. It may be hard to remember, but in 1986, there was no guarantee that the graphical user interface would win the day. It was mainly used by the ‘toy-like’ Macintosh machines — not by the ‘serious’ systems used by IT professionals. [21]

After a frenetic design period, the Mac was ready to be introduced in January 1984. Apple wanted a marketing campaign that would make the product stand out while communicating the broader vision of the California technotopians. The Chiat/Day advertising agency, known for its edgy work, scripted the ad. Film director Ridley Scott was hired to direct, fresh off Blade Runner, and given an unheard-of production budget of $900,000.[22]

The ad opens on a gray network of futuristic tubes connecting blank, ominous buildings. Inside the tubes, we see cowed subjects marching towards a cavernous auditorium, where they bow before a Big Brother figure pontificating from a giant TV screen. But one lone woman remains unbroken. Chased by storm troopers, she runs up to the screen, hurls a hammer with a heroic roar, and shatters the TV image. As the screen explodes, bathing the stunned audience in the light of freedom, a voice-over announces, “On January 24^th, Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”

After seeing Scott’s work, Jobs and his new hand-picked president of Apple, John Sculley, were sure they had a hit. They purchased one and a half minutes of ad time for the Super Bowl, annually the most-watched television program in America. In December 1983, they screened the commercial for the Apple board of directors. To Jobs’s and Sculley’s surprise, the entire board hated the commercial. Panicked, Sculley ran back to Chiat/Day to try to get them to sell back the ad time. Chiat/Day, still enthusiastic about their ad, dragged their feet, and only managed to sell off 30 seconds. Rather than take a loss on the 60-second ad, Apple decided to go ahead and run “1984.”[23]

Despite the board’s fears, Super Bowl viewers were overwhelmed by the startling ad. The ad garnered millions of dollars worth of free publicity, as news programs rebroadcast it that night. It was quickly hailed by many in the advertising industry as a masterwork.[24] Advertising Age named it the 1980s’ Commercial of the Decade[25], and it continues to rank high on lists of the most influential commercials of all time.[26] As we’ll see further in Chapter Eight, the ad – and the fantasy behind it – became a touchstone for the dot-com hype of the 1990s, anchoring the images of technology corporations ranging from “spunky” start-up companies like Monster.com and eBay to multinational telecommunications empires such as AT&T, Worldcom and Intel.

“1984” was never broadcast again after the Super Bowl, adding to its mystique. Unintentionally, Chiat/Day had invented the phenomenon known as “event marketing,” in which a high-visibility commercial garners mountains of extra free publicity. “1984” also inaugurated the phenomenon of showcasing commercials on the Super Bowl. And, most importantly for Apple, the ad brought consumers into the stores. It kicked off a successful $15 million, 100-day marketing blitz for the Mac.[27] Apple’s sales in the first 100 days of the Macintosh’s release exceeded their already high expectations,[28] and launched the Mac as a product and icon.

What “1984” accomplished was to tackle the specter of HAL head-on. It turned the confusing complexity of the Information Age – the ambivalence of Desk Set and 2001 – into a Manichean battle of good versus evil. There’s the bad technology – centralized, authoritarian – which crushes the human spirit and controls people’s minds. Read, IBM. But we can be liberated from that bad technology by the good technology – independent, individualized – of the Mac.

One irony of the commercial, though, is that what seemed to really impress TV viewers – what cost so much money to put on the screen – was the vision of the bad technology. It’s the futuristic gloss of that technology which is so compelling; all we get of the good technology is a hammer and the Mac logo on the athlete’s tank top. The schema of the “1984” ad allowed Apple to harness the visual fascination of a high-tech future, while dissociating itself from its dystopic underside.

“1984” also worked by re-gendering computing in important ways. The lone runner is female. As far as we can see, every single one of the drones, as well as Big Brother himself, is male. In the Manichean framework of the ad, women are on the side of the angels. This setup helps identify the Mac user as the underdog, the member of an oppressed group. It also distinguishes the Mac from all those other, male-identified computers. Despite the fact that the person described by some as the very first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, was a woman, modern computing has been culturally gendered as a male activity. Women remain a minority of all computer programmers, and young girls continue to receive less encouragement to use computers. The Mac signaled from the beginning that it stood for something different, affiliating Apple with the goal of equal access to computing for women.

But this isn’t all the ad did. In the allegorical framework of the ad, two levels of representation are at work. In one sense, the running woman stands for Mac users; in this interpretation, the Mac is the equivalent to the hammer, the tool she uses to destroy Big Brother. In another sense, though, the woman can be considered the personification of the Mac itself. The tank top she wears, which displays the Mac logo, suggests this correspondence. The ad does two things, then. It genders the archetypal Mac user as female. And it genders the Mac itself as female.

Gendering the Mac user as female implied that Apple stood for equal access to all for computing. It also helped open up an untapped market of potential women consumers. But just as importantly, gendering the Mac itself as female associated the Mac with a host of feminine-identified qualities which helped make the Mac seem more user-friendly for all users. Other computers were associated with the traditionally male-gendered sphere of the workplace; the Mac was the home computer. Other computers were rigid, imposing; the Mac was soft, curvaceous, user-friendly. Other computers were emotionless; the Mac was the personal computer. If gendering the Mac user as female implicitly presumed women had equal interest in using computers, gendering the Mac itself as female bucked computer conventions while still evoking a traditional gender model: the image of the computer as the friendly secretary, the able assistant with a smile on her face.

The star of the “1984” commercial isn’t just a woman; she’s an athlete, in clear control of her own body. The “1984” star is an early example of a media image now ubiquitous after a generation of Title IX: the woman empowering herself through achievement in sport, what we might call the “Reebok feminist.” In contrast to the body of the athletic hero of “1984,” the bodies of the oppressors have been colonized by technology. The Big Brother figure, his face hidden by reflected glasses and framed by blinking letters and numbers, seems almost to be a creature of the TV screen itself, rather than a flesh-and-blood person. The storm troopers’ entire faces are covered by masks the shade of an unplugged TV screen. And the drones’ bodies are covered in drab gray garments. Some drones even wear what appear to be gas masks. The drones’ masks, in fact, evoke the breathing apparatus of that quintessential cyborg nightmare of the era, Darth Vader. And their resemblance is even more striking to a subsequent popular vision of the horrors of the hyper-technologized body, the Borg of Star Trek.

Compared to these figures, the running woman, unencumbered in shorts, sneakers, and tank top, might seem to represent the body freed from technology. But that’s not completely right. Rather, she’s an example of the new kind of athletic ideal which emerged in the 1980s: the athlete who employs Nautilus, Stairmaster, and the other technologies of exercise to hone the body to perfection. This “robo-cized” athlete is the flip side of the cyborg nightmare. Rather than the technology wearing her, she wears the technology.

This vision of technology serving the body was most fully expressed in another 1980s phenomenon: the Walkman. The Walkman wasn’t just portable technology – it was wearable technology. The rise of the Walkman in the 1980s was a quintessential example of the phenomenon Raymond Williams describes as “mobile privatization”: the use of technologies to insulate the individual from larger social groups, turning even public spaces into private experiences.[29] With your Walkman on, you can imagine yourself as alone and self-sufficient, even in the middle of a bustling city.

As we have seen, the rise of the personal computer was a quintessential example of privatization, turning a public resource into a personal commodity. Granted, the personal computer in 1984 was not exactly mobile; it still tied the user to a desk. But the promise of cyberspace offered a new kind of fantasy of mobile privatization: that you could sit at the computer, in the comfort of your own home, and fly through data from around the world as swiftly and self-sufficiently as the running woman, making physical movement and interpersonal interaction unnecessary.

Alongside this fantasy of mobility through cyberspace, in the years since 1984, the development of laptops, PDAs, and wireless internet connections has made computing truly mobile in the same physical-world sense as the Walkman. Reflecting these developments, for the twentieth anniversary of the Mac, Apple re-released the “1984” ad on its website with one new digital addition: an iPod swinging from the running woman’s waist.[30]

A final irony of “1984” is the fact that the villain of the commercial is a television image. In the framework of the ad, TVs are bad, PCs are good. This would become a perennial theme of computer commercials – buy a PC so your kids will do something more constructive than watching TV commercials. (Of course, in the 1990s, once large numbers of American children gained access to computers, parents began to worry that it was the internet that would rot their children’s brains.) Allegorizing the TV-viewing experience was a clever way to engage the Super Bowl audience – especially since, by the third quarter of the typically one-sided game, most viewers were likely to feel something like zombies themselves. The commercial really did accomplish in real life what it dramatized onscreen, blowing the dazed viewers out of their chairs.

The odd part is that more viewers didn’t resent the implication that they were nothing but drones in need of deliverance. Presumably, this didn’t rub viewers the wrong way because it left open the possibility for everyone to identify with the hammer-thrower. Even if you didn’t rush out the next day to buy a Mac, you could imagine yourself as the kind of person who would, eventually. But the arrogance implicit in “1984” would come back to haunt Apple the following year. Apple and Chiat/Day’s much-anticipated follow-up for the 1985 Super Bowl, a spot called “Lemmings,”[31] was a flop. In that ad, a stream of blindfolded suit-and-tied businessmen is seen walking, one after another, off a cliff, to the tune of a dirgelike rendition of “Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Finally, one person steps out of the line, lifts his blindfold, and asks, “Why am I doing this?” The implication was that IBM PC users were the lemmings, Mac users the rebel. But many IBM users resented the attack, which seemed blunt and personal compared to the “1984” allegory. John Sculley writes, “The day after the Super Bowl, our telephone lines were overloaded with calls from irate people claiming they would never buy an Apple product again. They believed the commercial insulted the very people we were trying to court as customers in corporate America. Dealers flooded us with calls saying they were getting complaints from prospective customers.”[32] Mac sales, which had begun to slow down at the end of 1984, continued to stagnate, and soon Apple fired Chiat/Day and moved its account to BBD&O. There was no blockbuster Mac commercial on the 1986 Super Bowl.

Flash Forward

Cut to August 1997. In a hotel ballroom in Boston, the assembled Apple faithful, convened for the annual MacWorld Expo convention, received a jarring dose of deja vu. Onstage was Steve Jobs. Jobs had been forced out of Apple shortly after the introduction of his pet project, the Mac. But as Apple struggled to survive following the introduction of Microsoft’s hugely successful, Mac-like Windows 95 operating system, Jobs emerged once again as the company’s designated savior.

Jobs took the podium to announce a deal he promised would turn Apple around. He turned to the enormous video screen behind him, and up popped a giant image none other than Bill Gates, CEO of the hated Microsoft, IBM’s successor as Apple’s arch-rival.

Gates had agreed to invest $150 million in Apple, in return for Apple’s endorsement of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. That ominous image of Gates on the giant screen recalled another image from Apple’s history: the Orwellian despot of “1984.” The crowd, getting the irony right away, was stunned. Many booed. Jobs, it seems, had made a deal with the devil.

So, had Apple betrayed what it promised in “1984”? Yes, but only in the sense that by 1997, some of the contradictions implicit in the original ad had begun to come home to roost. For many other technology companies, the reckoning came a few years later, after the NASDAQ crash of 2000.

As we’ve seen, the ideology of “1984” was built on a series of Manichean dichotomies. The heroic individual versus the despotic institution. The spunky start-up versus the smothering monopoly. Casting IBM as a monolithic threat to freedom allowed Apple, already a $500 million company at the time, to present itself as a lone underdog by comparison. (I’m sure even smaller computer manufacturers, such as Commodore, saw the picture somewhat differently.) Apple may present itself as a smaller, kinder, gentler corporation, but it operates by the same rules of the marketplace as everybody else. In comparison to a smothering monopoly, entrepreneurialism can look pretty exciting. But that doesn’t much affect the underlying inequities of capitalism. While Apple celebrated its computers’ ability to empower knowledge workers, the manual laborers who built the Mac’s chips, assembled its hardware, and swept up after its programmers were not so liberated by the promise of individual computation. For those workers, the difference between the era of IBM hegemony and the hyper-competition of today’s marketplace is that the pace of the “New Economy” increases job instability, which in turn makes unionization incredibly difficult. Unions don’t fit in well with the libertarian fantasy of the “1984” ad – workers are somehow supposed to empower themselves individually. High technology, in fact, is the least unionized industry in the United States.[33]

The framing of the battle of monopoly versus competition, then, elides another conflict – that between labor and management. It also avoids another alternative to competition: state regulation. In Orwell’s original scenario, the state is Big Brother, the source of oppression. In Apple’s version of 1984, the target is not so clear – Big Brother is most obviously IBM, but more generally seems to represent any conglomeration of centralized power. This recognition that multi-national corporations may be more powerful and dangerous than nation-states is a theme the ad shares with its literary contemporary, cyberpunk fiction, and is part of what makes the ad feel so compelling and relevant, even two decades after its release. But by lumping in the state with the mega-corporation as just another monopoly of power, the ad presumes that the only route to liberation is unregulated competition – the free market. In the guise of counter-cultural idealism, the ideology of “1984” has come to mean endorsing the most unrestricted, brutal forms of capitalist competition.

So perhaps it’s not worth crying for Apple’s loss of innocence in the 1990s and beyond. Steve Jobs promised to change the world, but for all his supposed idealism, Apple never questioned the rules of competition. This is no surprise; Jobs was a businessman with a company to run. If he were any more of an idealist, he would have been out of a job even quicker than he was. But the collapse of Jobs’s utopian rhetoric suggests the limitations of dreams dictated by the marketplace.

[1]. Owen W. Linzmayer, Apple Confidential (San Francisco: No Starch, 1999) 90.

[2]. Figures taken from Linzmayer, Apple Confidential, 7-8.

[3]. Veit, Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer, 99-100.

[4]. Linzmayer, Apple Confidential, 13.

[5]. Veit, Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer, 99.

[6]. Cringely, Accidental Empires, 65.

[7]. Augarten, Bit by Bit, 260.

[8]. Augarten, Bit by Bit, 261.

[9] . Cringely, Accidental Empires, 159-181.

[10]. Cringely, Accidental Empires, 119-138.

[11]. Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, 255.

[12]. Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, 255.

[13]. Cringely, Accidental Empires, 159-181. On IBM’s troubles, see Ferguson and Morris, Computer Wars.

[14]. Cringely, Accidental Empires, 175.

[15]. Apple’s representatives to software companies were known as “evangelists,” and were charged with the mission of proselytizing for the company, convincing programmers to invest in the development of Apple software. See Kawasaki, The Macintosh Way and Selling the Dream.

[16]. Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, 256. Quotations from Chposky and Leonsis, Blue Magic.

[17]. Linzmayer, Apple Confidential, 42.

[18]. See Levy, Insanely Great; Smith and Alexander, Fumbling the Future; Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning.

[19]. See Bardini, Bootstrapping; Steven Levy, Insanely Great.

[20]. See Smith and Alexander, Fumbling the Future; Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning.

[21]. Neilsen, “Voice Interfaces.”

[22]. Linzmayer, The Mac Bathroom Reader,117.

[23]. Sculley recounts this story in Odyssey, 154-182.

[24]. Millman, “Apple’s ‘1984’ Spot: A Love/Hate Story.”

[25]. Horton, “TV Commercial of the Decade,” 12.

[26]. See Johnson, “10 Years After 1984,” 1; Conrad, The One Hundred Best TV Commercials.

[27]. Linzmayer, The Mac Bathroom Reader, 120; Bob Marich, “The Real Blitz Begins,” 1.

[28]. Linzmayer, The Mac Bathroom Reader, 111.

[29]. Williams, Television, 20; Williams, Towards 2000,187-9. See also du Gay et al, Doing Cultural Studies.

[30]. “20 Years of Macintosh 1984-2004.”

[31]. “Lemmings,” Apple Computer, advertisement, Chiat/Day, 1985.

[32]. Sculley, Odyssey, 228.

[33]. Kadetsky, “Silicon Valley Sweatshops: High-Tech’s Dirty Little Secret.”