Thirty years ago this week, Apple aired its "1984" commercial during the Super Bowl, teasing the Macintosh personal computer. Two days later on Jan. 24, cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs officially unveiled the device at the Flint Center near Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
Both of these are now considered pivotal moments in Apple's history and the history of personal-computing technology. Far less well-known, however, is that six days after the Flint Center appearance, Jobs did a public demonstration of the Mac on the other side of the country in front of the Boston Computer Society.
Footage of that appearance, along with the backstory of how it happened and how the event almost fell apart, are now online for the first time courtesy of Harry McCracken, TIME magazine's editor-at-large.
"I would have been there, if I hadn’t blown it," McCracken writes. "What I was doing the night that Steve Jobs came to Boston I don’t remember, but I’ve been wincing about my misplaced priorities ever since."
McCracken reached out to people involved with the event, and discovered that there were analog recordings, but nothing else. Recently, though, three of the people with the Boston Computer Society partnered with another organization and a venture capitalist to digitize the video.
The end result, as you can see below, is more than 90 minutes of footage showing Jobs giving a theatrical introduction to the Mac, demoing it to the audience and answering questions on stage along with other Apple employees. The video shows clear flashes of the Steve Jobs that people would come to know at Apple keynotes in the following decades.