Before the year 2000, Super Bowl commercials from tech companies offered millions of viewers their first glimpses of the future. Gizmodo watched dozens of videos from the 1980s and ‘90s to find the most iconic Super Bowl commercials from the early tech industry.
Fax machines, internet connections, and Nokia phones may sound outdated now, but they used to be the cutting edge. These ads are far different from the tech commercials you’ll see in this year’s Super Bowl. We had to pull out our encyclopedias just to figure out what some of these companies were selling.
Tech dominates Super Bowl commercials nowadays, but these early ads remind us why we get excited about NFL timeouts in the first place. These ads sold the future, and looking back is a great way to measure just how far we’ve come.
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This was a rare Apple commercial that was widely hated. Most of Apple’s branding and marketing is perfect, however, crowds notoriously thought this 1985 commercial sucked. It’s still one of the company’s most famous ads, but “Lemmings” painted people who used other computers as drone-like humans. Apple users were the only ones who could see clearly, much like Steve Jobs thought of himself. The whole thing was an ad for Macintosh Office, but that product wouldn’t actually be ready until years later.
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MCI was a telecommunications company that dominated the commercials of the 1997 Super Bowl. This ad described to early internet users what emoticons meant. It was one of the first commercials truly embracing internet meme culture.
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IBM launched its “PC Jr,” a smaller version of its already popular computer during the 1984 Super Bowl. A Charlie Chaplin impersonator was featured in a number of the company’s ads at this time, with the idea of using something old to make people feel better about something so new. There was a personal computing battle going on during the commercials of that Super Bowl, leading The New York Times to write an article called “The Other Superbowl: I.B.M vs. Apple” about the feuding tech companies.
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A long-forgotten member of the personal computer battle in 1984 was Atari. The video game pioneer was also promoting its “easy to set up” home computer, showing how you just needed to plug it in. The commercial got way less attention than Apple and IBM, perhaps because it actually looks kind of complicated the way Alan Alda is setting up that computer.
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This commercial from Network Associates features two nuclear launch controllers who question if they’ve received a message from a hacker. Network Associates offered services to keep your internet connection secure
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Comedian Drew Carey was featured in this iconic commercial, showing off his purple Nokia 6100 phone. Carey was able to win the respect of a man driving a lowrider flexing his hydraulics by showing off his agility and his new phone.
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The 1999 Super Bowl was filled with commercials from the .com era. It was the year everything became a website, and some of the most successful websites had enough cash flowing through them to make Super Bowl commercials. This one from Monster.com offered its job-finding services to millions with a clear message: your kid self would be disappointed in your current job.
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Here’s another example of MCI’s Super Bowl commercials presence in 1997. This ad shows how the internet could connect astronauts to children in a classroom. It’s a wholesome picture of what the internet could be in the best of circumstances.
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This AT&T commercial featuring a young Kate Mara depicts just how fast information can travel on phones and computers. A message whispered in a lunchroom ended up being known to everyone in town before the end of the school day.
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This infamous Super Bowl commercial from Apple dominated technology in 1984. The commercial depicted a dystopian version of 1984 as George Orwell’s book had envisioned it. Drone-like humans under an oppressive computing leader, IBM. Discus thrower and model Anya Major was hired to play a liberator, who broke the computer screen and made way for Apple computing. This commercial resonated incredibly well with audiences and serves as a bar that all tech commercials are compared against 40 years later.
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Source: Gizmodo