Leave it to Friday to be the best. Because, you know, Friday and all.
Yesterday, I talked about the computer as life-changing innovation, mixing a little personal nostalgia with two choice commercials about a computer company that wants to change your life.
Today, we’re moving further back in time, to an even earlier time in the life of the personal computer. The year is 1988, and the company is Apple.
The funniest thing is, while I was watching these commercials earlier this week, I recalled a Saturday Night Live commercial parody that was in the same vein as one of these commercials. It involved a little kid who made an amazing school project on his computer, earning the simultaneous admiration and envy of his classmates. The slogan, as I recall, was The Power To Crush The Other Kids.
In today’s two-part harmony of commercials, the same thing happens.
We have a kid who creates amazing school projects, but its like the principal is accusing him of not doing the work himself…but there’s a catch to why he sounds so shocked.
And in our other commercial, we have people with amazing talents that could be the next geniuses…
…all if they have the right computer.
Because, as we know, genius can strike at anytime.
Just buy the right computer, you’ll see.
You’ll also see when you click play how the right computer can get you places!
Apple always had this way of letting us know that we’re all capable of great things, imagination, dreams, and potential. Their advertising emphasized the most creative minds. My Psychology and US History teacher in eleventh grade (yes, she taught two subjects) had advertisements for Apple hanging up in her classroom featuring brilliant minds like Jim Henson and Albert Einstein (it was part of an ad campaign in the late 90s/early 2000s). She displayed them as a means of showing us that we can be more.
And isn’t that what we should all strive for?
So, I don’t need to say much about Apple. We know they’re still around, we know what products they make, and we know how much they dominate. I myself owned an Apple iPhone 4 and an iPad 2. Obviously, I’ve had a few cell phones since then, and I traded in my iPad in 2014 for a Microsoft Surface (big mistake – I really didn’t like that tablet), which I eventually traded in. I’m actually writing this on a non-Apple tablet…a Samsung Galaxy Tab E.
Take that, Apple!
But the first computer I ever played on in the classroom was the Apple 2e and its green screen glory, and it holds some sentimental value in my heart. My love of computers was forged through Windows 3.1 and those Computer Science classes I had in the early 1990s, but that Mac computer in the classroom was definitely something cool.
Anyway, that does it for this week. We learned so much about the amazing wonders of the personal computer and what it did for us a long time ago. I told a personal nostalgia story, we watched a few commercials, and we still can’t believe monitors and computers looked like that.
Incredible.
Have a fantastic Flashback Friday, and here’s to a great weekend!