Super Bowl XVIII took place on January 22, 1984. Not a bad way to spend my 12th birthday, even if my Jets had finished in the AFC east cellar (again) that season. But the most memorable part of the broadcast (unless you were a Raiders or Washington fan) was a commercial that aired live for the first and only time during the game. The original legendary Super Bowl ad boldly promised that “1984 won’t be like 1984.” It was, of course, a commercial, created by legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott (director of Blade Runner, Gladiator, etc) heralding the launch of the Apple Macintosh computer. Not bad for a company started in a garage with a rainbow apple as its logo.
What you might not know is how Jewish the first Macintosh actually was. The Macintosh, the first commercially successful PC to use a mouse and a graphical user interface featuring folders and windows, was inspired by the work done at the experimental computer lab at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). This lab was created in 1970 by Jacob Goldman, the chief scientist for Xerox, a Brooklyn-born graduate of Yeshiva University. In fact, it was a sneak peek at the work done at PARC that inspired Steve Jobs to create the Macintosh in the first place! But Jobs didn’t create the Mac by himself. It was Apple’s 31st employee, Jef Raskin, who assembled the team in 1979 that would create the Macintosh (which Raskin named after his favorite apple). Raskin wanted to design a computer that would make creation as easy as the spoken word. As Raskin wrote, “I come from a culture where the Word was held in esteem, words had nearly magical powers. Reading and writing are taken for granted by almost everybody, but the Jewish culture my family was embedded in had not forgotten how special language is.” The final product indeed bears many of Raskin’s imprints, such as the click and drag interface, use of “fonts,” and the QuickDraw graphics system.
Raskin may be known as the “father of the Macintosh,” but fellow Mac team member Andy Hertzfeld is known as the “soul” of the Mac software group. Hertzfeld wrote much of the code for the original Macintosh operating system, including many elements of its signature graphical user interface. Andy contributed greatly to the feel of the Mac, and the look of its interface is due in large part to Andy’s high school friend, fellow member-of-the-tribe Susan Kare, whom he recruited to design many of the Mac’s original icons and typefaces, including the Chicago font (used from the first Mac all the way through the original iPod), the command key symbol (⌘), and the iconic (literally) happy Mac face that greeted each and every user upon startup. There were other Jewish team members, too, such as Joanna Hoffman, daughter of Polish film director Jerzy Hoffman. She was the Macintosh’s first head of marketing whom Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki called “the [Mac] division’s conscience.”
Rewatching the iconic Super Bowl ad today, it’s shocking how relevant (or prescient?) it is. The darkly pervasive presence of authoritarian rule, insisting that difference be flattened into two dimensions of black and white. The use of masks in polluted air. The inescapable menacing glow of the screen. But all of that is defeated in an instant by a woman in full color who summons her inner courage and her outer strength to shatter the voice that demands unthinking compliance and conformity. With the right ideas behind it, one tiny little rainbow apple can change the world. It’s going to take all of our strength, our hope, and our will to make sure that 2025 doesn’t lead into 1984. We are going to need to, in the words of another famous Apple slogan, Think Different.
Cantor Eric Schulmiller
