Steve Jobs’ first Macintosh “presentation, at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting on January 24, is the stuff of tech-history legend,” Harry McCracken reports for TIME Magazine. “What’s not so well remembered: Jobs did it all twice, in less than a week. Six days after unveiling the Mac at the Flint Center on the De Anza College campus near the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., he performed his show all over again at the monthly general meeting of the Boston Computer Society.”
“All 90 minutes of [the video]… available for the first time in their entirety since they were shot on January 30, 1984,” McCracken reports. “The Cupertino and Boston demos may have been based in part on the same script, but the audience, atmosphere and bonus materials were different. In Cupertino, Jobs spoke before investors, towards the end of a meeting which also included dreary matters such as an analysis of Apple’s cash flow. In Boston, he presented to the kind of people who Apple hoped would buy Macs. You didn’t even have to pay the BCS’s $24 annual membership fee to get in, which meant that the meeting was the closest thing the computer had to a launch event intended for the general public.”
“After the unveiling, Jobs participated in demos and a Q&A session with members of the Macintosh team: Bill Atkinson, Steve Capps, Owen Densmore, Andy Hertzfeld, Bruce Horn, Rony Sebok, Burrell Smith and Randy Wigginton,” McCracken reports. “(Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, not a Mac team member, crashed the panel and talked about the Apple II line of computers.) Even more than the shareholder meeting, the BCS one was a prototype for the media extravaganzas that we citizens of the 21st century call Stevenotes.”
Direct link to video and much more background about this event in the full article – recommended – here.
[Attribution: FairerPlatform. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]