Twenty-five years ago today . . .

. . . during the third quarter of Superbowl XVIII, an iconic commercial was played. It was never broadcast again - but it's been hailed as one of the greatest commercials ever made.

The Apple Macintosh '1984' advertisement won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival later that year, and went on to garner many other awards. It would be named in 2007 as the best advertisement in the history of the Super Bowl; be called the 'Number One greatest commercial of all time' by TV Guide in 1999; and, in 1995, won Advertising Age's award for the greatest commercial ever made.

The funny thing is, many computer users of today weren't even born then, or weren't old enough to understand what a revolution the Macintosh was in its day. It introduced the graphical user interface (GUI) to the mass market. Sure, the GUI had been around before in some high-end products like workstations, but the Macintosh pushed it onto the normal desktop. Microsoft would follow suit with its Windows product in due course, which is today ubiquitous. However, Apple devotees still maintain that Apple's operating system and interface remain superior to Windows. I've used both, and I like Apple very much, but quite frankly I don't worry about minor differences between the interfaces. To me, what's important is the work that I'm doing, rather than the platform on which I'm doing it.

I started working with computers in the mid-1970's, military systems to begin with, then commercial mainframes, then minicomputers, then micro-computers. I can recall the Apple II, the IBM PC of 1981, the PC/XT with its hard disk, and the IBM PC-AT of 1984 with its 80286 processor running at 6mHz. (headlined by PC Magazine as having 'Blinding speed! Amazing storage!'). Of course, today's PC's make all those systems look like typewriters by comparison.

Ah, yes, the good old days . . . but quite frankly, I prefer modern systems.

Peter