Unaired Original Mac Ad from Apple Surfaces

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A rare, never aired television ad for Apple's original Macintosh was making the rounds Friday after Mac co-creator and current Google software engineer Andy Hertzfeld shared it on his Google+ profile and 9to5Mac brought it to a wider audience.

The commercial, which features Hertzfeld and other members of the original Mac team discussing their baby, never appeared on TV "because Apple deemed it too self-congratulatory, although it was used in some promotional materials sent to dealers," Hertzfeld wrote.

"So we set out to capture the greatness of Lisa in something affordable to individuals rather than corporations," he says in the unaired ad, in which he's identified as a Macintosh "software wizard." Hertzfeld was referring to Apple's business-targeted, graphical interface-sporting Lisa computer released in January 1983.

Also appearing in the ad are Mac team members Andy Hertzfeld, George Crow, Bill Atkinson, Mike Murray, and Burrell Smith—though the most famous architect of the Mac, Steve Jobs, does not appear.

One of the more intriguing and ultimately prescient segments features Macintosh marketing manager Mike Murray, where he talks about the "balance of power" shifting from "companies running people to hopefully people running companies." That sounds an awful lot like ongoing "consumerization of IT" that wasn't brought about by the Mac but rather helped along many years later by another famous Apple product, the iPhone.

Apple eventually introduced the Mac to the world via the famous Ridley Scott-directed "1984" ad that aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on Jan. 22, 1984. Popular history holds that "1984" was only broadcast that one time, but it actually ran one other time at 1 a.m. one morning in December 1983 on KMVT in Twin Falls, Idaho, for the purpose of making it eligible for awards.

Like "1984," the unaired Mac ad was conceived by Venice, Calif.-based advertising agency Chiat\Day, now a division of TBWA Worldwide.

For more from Damon, follow him on Twitter @dpoeter.

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