I worked for Apple back in 1984 as a Sales Rep, and was in the audience that afternoon at the annual Apple Sales Conference in Hawaii when Jobs introduced the 1984 ad. The Lisa had been out for a year, and though it was brilliant technology, it had failed miserably to catch on with the Fortune 1000 companies, which had been the target market. While the Apple II was still selling briskly, the handwriting was on the wall--Apple had to find a new winner, and fast.
We all knew about the secret Mac project, which was basically a cheap version of Lisa. That sales conference was our first introduction to the 128k (that's right, 128KB of ram) Mac.
When we saw the ad, we were stunned beyond words and screamed our heads off. Many of us were hoarse the next day. It certainly didn't hurt for all us guys (nearly all the sales force was male) that the heroine was a braless young woman who showed a kind of, ahem, "bounce" in her step.
The irony, as others have mentioned, is that Apple is now, in many ways, the "Big Brother" that the ad denounced. But back then it was IBM and the inane DOS operating system. We all had the WYSIWYG religion back in those days, long before Microsoft's Windows.
Oh, and the Board HAD canceled the SuperBowl spot, and was asking the ad agency to try to sell the time to someone else without suffering too great a loss. But Jobs and others convinced them otherwise.
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