Filed under: Retro Mac, Blast From the Past
Blast from the Past: 1986 Apple Ad
If your business is out of control, suggests this ad, perhaps a Macintosh could solve all your problems, with its shiny, shiny spreadsheets, word processing, and other business features that allow you to concentrate on your business rather than learning how to become a computer expert. More to the point, the Macintosh proves it can defeat alligators and lower the incidence of in-office sewage... or something like that. You do have to give the ad-makers credit for their clever twist on the standard lemonade-from-lemons solution.
I am assured by those having worked with the Macs of that time, and with managers of that vintage, that many of those early, expensive macs ended up rarely used on managers' desks as a kind of status symbol rather than as an actual productivity tool. And that those alligators might have been cheered on just a bit by the employees.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
David said 1:01PM on 4-09-2007
It's amazing Apple's still in business. :-)
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Andrew said 1:14PM on 4-09-2007
"If your business is out of control, suggests this ad, perhaps a Macintosh could solve all your problems, with its shiny, shiny spreadsheets, word processing, and other business features that allow you to concentrate on your business rather than learning how to become a computer expert."
That sentence defies all english logic
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Nick said 1:50PM on 4-09-2007
"Blast from the Past: 1986 Apple Ad"
Ah, yes. But for OS X users the interesting thing is not what Apple was doing at the time but what Steve Jobs was.
" After several months of being sidelined at Apple, he resigned on Friday, September 13, 1985 ...
" ... By mid-1986, it was clear that no existing operating system (OS) would be able to meet their tentative specification for an object-oriented programming environment and user interface. This forced a major change in the business plan: not only would NeXT create an object-oriented programming environment, they would need to build hardware and a Unix-like Mach-based OS for the toolkit to run on. ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1987.E2.80.931993:_NeXT_Computer.2C_Inc.
It retrospect he made the right decisions, and it's not his (reborn) company Paul Graham is laughing at:
"All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway."
http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
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Bill Bradford said 2:51PM on 4-09-2007
April 1993 UNIXWorld magazine cover:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870210/
"Does Steve Jobs have a future in software?" 8-)
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Adrian said 6:00PM on 4-09-2007
"That sentence defies all english logic"
Nonsense, Andrew. It makes perfect sense; understanding it does require an attention span of more than three milliseconds though.
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VanillaSpice said 8:26PM on 4-10-2007
The line seems perfectly reasonable and coherent to me, Andrew. It is a valid way of saying, "This ad suggests that if your business is out of control, perhaps a Macintosh could solve all your problems ... "
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