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Macintosh Software Dating Game

Three months before the Macintosh launch, Steve Jobs stages a ‘Dating Game’ parody for Apple’s sales force in which three software CEOs compete for the Mac’s affections.

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  1. 1983

    Macintosh Software Dating Game

    Three months before the Macintosh launch, Steve Jobs stages a ‘Dating Game’ parody for Apple’s sales force in which three software CEOs compete for the Mac’s affections.

  2. 1983

    Fall Comdex 1983 show-floor footage (cameo)

    VisiCalc co-creator Dan Bricklin and a colleague walked the floor of Fall Comdex 1983 with a video camera, capturing a long demonstration of the not-yet-shipped Microsoft Windows three weeks after its announcement and, elsewhere in the footage, a brief appearance by Gates.

  3. 1984

    Macintosh introduction promotional film

    An Apple promotional film produced for the Macintosh rollout in which Bill Gates appears alongside Apple’s engineers, saying Microsoft had been working with Apple on the Mac for about two years, praising its graphics and speed and calling it ‘a great machine’ many people would be able to afford.

  4. 1985

    Windows 1.0 introduction and demo

    Period footage of a 30-year-old Gates presenting Windows 1.0, walking through its tiled windows and switching between applications. It is one of the few surviving on-camera records of Microsoft’s first graphical product at the time of its November 1985 release.

  5. 1987

    Twenty-minute interview (1987)

    A twenty-minute interview with the 31-year-old Gates from 1987, the year he became the youngest billionaire and Microsoft announced OS/2 with IBM, Windows 2.0 and Excel for Windows. The program and interviewer are not identified in the archived copy.

  6. 1987

    Microsoft Excel press questions

    A short news clip of Gates, glasses slipping down his nose, answering press questions at the unveiling of Excel for Windows, telling reporters it ‘really improves the quality of your output’.

  7. 1989

    Talk on Microsoft and the software industry

    A roughly 90-minute talk to Waterloo students, rediscovered and digitised by the university’s Computer Science Club in 2007, in which the 33-year-old Gates recounts the microcomputer industry from the Altair onward, explains the 640K memory barrier and the 8-bit to 16-bit transition, defends Microsoft’s OS/2 strategy, discusses the Apple v.