Watch Steve Jobs’ first Mac demo in this 1984 throwback video

Watch Steve Jobs’ first Mac demo in this 1984 throwback video

Apple's Macintosh product line turns 30 this month. Here's a video of its public debut

Steve Jobs and Apple have always been known for their dramatic, spectacular keynote addresses, and this video shows why: They’ve had 30 years of practice. In the video, Jobs presents the first public demonstration of the first Apple Macintosh desktop computer.

In a now-ironic moment, Jobs presents the then-upstart Apple as the “only hope” to unseat IBM, playing on fears of a monopolistic technology market punctuated by scenes from “1984.” Apple is now the most valuable company in the world, valued at over $416 billion.

A few takeaways? The machine was sold at what Jobs referred to as a “mainstream pricepoint” of $2,495 – nearly $5,600 in today’s dollars. For that money, you could buy 10 iPhone 5cs at full retail price, any one of which would have orders of magnitude more computing power than the first Macintosh. In garbled speech not altogether that worse than today’s Siri utility, the patriarchal Mac even cracks a joke about the size of IBM mainframes in those days.

Even 30 years ago, Job’s vision of world dominance is obvious. “What we wanted to do with Macintosh was make it the first personal computer that was designed from the start to be built in the millions,” he says.

Mission accomplished, Steve. Check out the full video below:

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