How the “lost” Mac intro video was found in my living room

2005

In 2004 Andy Hertzfeld was working on folklore.org, his now-legendary website (that became a book) devoted to first-person stories of the earliest days of the Mac. Andy was writing one of the key stories of the saga, about the day of the Mac's public unveiling in 1984. I mentioned to him that I had a video – on a videocassette – of that event, and he might want to watch it to spur his memory of the great day. So Andy came over, we watched the video, he took notes, and wrote his story. In the comments on folklore.org, Andy generously thanked me for showing him the video.

Andy's telling of one of the most important moments in computing history was riveting. Soon after the story appeared and readers learned there was a video, they naturally wanted to see it. I had recorded the video in 1984 from a local public TV station’s over the air broadcast. Then it sat on a shelf in my house for a while – OK, for 20 years – until it apparently became something rare.

I had no way to digitize the video so that folks could see it. And even if I could get it digitized, I wasn’t sure how I would share it in those pre-YouTube days. Replying to Andy’s comment, people asked if I could put the video online. I explained the problem:

After a few days I did actually hear from someone who wanted to digitize the ancient video. He was a video producer in Germany named majo. He had a website with a bunch of Mac videos and related computing stuff that looked good to me. majo promised to digitize the video and post it for anyone to watch and download. Although I had never met majo and he was more than 5000 miles away, for some reason I decided to trust him. I put the precious videotape in a mailing envelope and shipped it off to majo in Germany.

I heard from majo within a few days. He got the tape and began working to digitize it, but he struggled with the terrible quality of the video. Not only was it 20 years old, it was a low-quality home format, and the original show had not been well lit. Still, he did a fine job and extracted the most important segment.

On January 24, 2005, majo posted the video on his site to celebrate the Mac's 21st birthday. The traffic was overwhelming. Streaming? There was no streaming. To watch, you had to download the 20MB file, a substantial transaction for the slow Internet connections of that era, and majo's site soon crashed. In the vernacular of the day, his site was Fireballed, SlashDotted, kottke.orged, and so on, as popular sites like those delivered loads of web visitors. He begged for mirror sites to host copies of the video, and a bunch of other people helped out. I wrote a blog post and watched the comments appear in a mostly east to west flow as the sun came up around the world and people discovered the "lost" video that I didn't realize was lost. The comments showed how excited people were to discover this bit of history, and how eager they were to help by mirroring it. It was a very cool day.

By the end of the busy day I finally had time to watch majo's edit of the video. To my surprise, he had added my name near the end with this generous but grandiose credit:

A more accurate credit would have been "Recorded in January 1984 and kept on a shelf in the living room by Scott Knaster". But this was OK too.

Three weeks later, as if on cue, YouTube was founded.

Soon copies of the video started making their way to YouTube. Most of them included the part at the end with my name. After a while there were hundreds of different copies on YouTube. Some of them have millions of views. Why are there so many copies? I have no idea. I gained an odd sort of fame as I was adjacent to this greatness. Occasionally I heard from far-away TV producers or documentary makers asking for permission to use “my” video. Many people assumed I was operating the camera that filmed the event, which of course I wasn’t.

In the months that followed, majo extracted and digitized other, less monumental clips from the Mac intro. Those have made their way to YouTube also. The video of the full meeting is available, and you can watch if you have a spare hour and a half and a desire to see corporate governance and financial reporting.

When majo had finished digitizing the tape, he sent it back to me. The little tape completed its 10,000 mile journey unscathed.

The story continues

Many years later, I started to wonder whatever happened to majo, and whether he had digitized any more clips. I went to his old website, but it seemed long-dormant. After some further digging I found sad news: majo died in 2010. I never did meet him, but he's the one who really got this video out into the world. All I did was neglect to get rid of an old videotape. I wish I had gotten to meet him.

In 2014, I met Mac historian and video mastermind Tom Frikker at an event for the Mac’s 30th anniversary. I saw Tom again the following year when he was working on recreating the original Mac demo and other events for the movie Steve Jobs. Since then Tom has spent time improving the quality of the original video. Some of Tom’s restoration handiwork was on display at the Computer History Museum’s “Hello: the Apple Mac @40” event in January 2024.

Flint Center, where the Mac was introduced down the road from Apple in Cupertino in 1984, was demolished in December 2024.

The tape I recorded still works.