January 28, 2004|Theodore Roszak |
Theodore Roszak is professor emeritus of history at California State University, Hayward. His books include "The Making of a Counter Culture," "The Cult of Information" and most recently the novel "The Devil and Daniel Silverman" (Leapfrog Press, 2003). Who played in the Super Bowl in 1984? Not many people can remember -- fewer, I'll bet, than remember the woman who came sprinting across the television screen at halftime to toss a great big hammer at a glowering Big Brother. Talk about coming on strong. That was how Apple Computer announced the first Macintosh: a 60-second Orwellian mini-drama directed by Ridley Scott that was destined to become perhaps the most famous commercial ever made.
It's 20 years later, and Apple has "repurposed" the ad to help sell iPods as Super Bowl XXXVIII rolls around. Once again you can see an insurgent little company advertising itself as the hope of the human race. Brash as it was, that commercial embodied the Utopian future so many people saw in the computer just two decades ago.
Of course, Apple got a lot of things wrong.
First, the casting. In 1984, the cognoscenti saw Big Brother as IBM, which dominated the PC market at the time. But the future of the computer industry didn't belong to IBM's machines, it belonged to the "disk-operating system" IBM had franchised to run its machines. That was a program called DOS, created by a little-known firm called Microsoft. Apple never saw it coming, but Bill Gates would become the Big Brother of modern computing. Before the end of the decade, he would, shall we say, "borrow" the Macintosh graphical interface, call it Windows, and capture the industry.
Nothing did more to ruin the high hopes represented by Apple's hammer-tossing woman than the dominance of Microsoft, soon to become the most ruthless monopoly since Standard Oil. The result has been inferior technology cleverly contrived to keep the public buying one mediocre and buggy program after another. But then, what would you expect from a company that seems to make as much money from litigation as invention?
Given the commercial opportunism with which Microsoft has contaminated the industry, it's difficult now to recapture the ebullience that originally greeted the personal computer. This was not simply a machine, it was a dream, a cause, an ideal. The hackers who tinkered the first computers into existence were driven by high social expectations. They were bringing humankind the great gift of information -- endless amounts of free information.