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Watch Steve Jobs demonstrate the Macintosh to the public for the first time

Watch Steve Jobs demonstrate the Macintosh to the public for the first time

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Steve Jobs debuted the first Macintosh computer before a packed room of shareholders on January 24th, 1984. But that wasn't the end of the story: only days later, Jobs appeared before the Boston Computer Society to show the Mac to the public for the first time. Time has recovered the full, 90-minute presentation never-before-released online, along with the entire backstory of how the presentation came about. The BCS was an important audience for Jobs to court, since founder Jonathan Rotenberg was a noted industry figure at the time. But this was Jobs in his glory. According to Dan Bricklin, co-inventor of VisiCalc, "You get to see Steve when Steve became the Steve Jobs."

Here, Jobs at first repeats his earlier presentation, but then proceeds to expand on it for the audience, discussing how the personal computer was on the cusp of something world-changing — much like the telephone that came before it:

And what we think we have here is the first telephone. And in addition to letting you do the old spreadsheets and word processing, it lets you sing. It lets you make pictures. It lets you make diagrams where you cut them and past them into your documents. It lets you put that sentence in Bold Helvetica or Old English, if that’s the way you want to express yourself.