The Apple Macintosh turns 21 years old today and as a birthday present, the long-lost video of its introduction by Steve Jobs has been posted to the web by TextLab on their weblog:
Fear not, faithful Mac believers. We have found it. We have found what seems to be the only copy of a public TV broadcast on that very day. It was recorded and preserved by Scott Knaster, the "legendary Mac hacker", as Amazon puts it. Scott kept the tape (a NTSC Betamax III longplay) for 21 years since he keeps everything. Andy Hertzfeld saw it when he wrote the story "The Times They Are A-Changin'" on folklore.org. From there we followed the hints, and that's how we found it.
We worked with Scott to convert it from NTSC to PAL, we've polished it, cleaned it, huged it and digitzed it. Here it is. It goes back to the people who've made the Macintosh, and to the world. The complete material of about 2 hours is returned to Scott, Andy and the folklore.org people, and this weblog will report the story of the "missing 1984 video" in detail. We'll release other clips in the coming days, so bookmark and check back.
That page is super slow right now, so I've compiled a few links to the video (QuickTime, 20.9 MB). Enjoy:
Torrent file (use this if at all possible)
Torrent file (use this if at all possible)
preinheimer.com
cm.math.uiuc.edu/~staffin/
urbanmainframe.com.nyud.net:8090
ad.hominem.org
kappesante.com
brooksnet.plus.com
bluehome.net
afsheenfamily.com
kottke.org
cluecoder.org/~bene/
publicvoidblog.de
php-schmiede.de
mac-software-updates.de
homepage.mac.com/sdomanske/
Thanks to Peter for the pointer.
