Most of the time we’ve found ourselves as accidental Future distributors. It’s just been a side effect of what we enjoy doing. But in 1993, inspired by AT&T’s You Will ads and the confluence of various technologies, we intentionally and literally distributed the Future, to friends and family.
The You Will ads weren’t just our inspiration, they were also a big part of our implementation. It’s a bit of a long story. Here’s part 1.
In 1991, Alan and his networking team at Apple were lucky enough to share a building with the group working on QuickTime, a project to enable the Mac to play video. By 1993 that effort had evolved to the point where we could take VHS recordings of the You Will ads, digitize those along with other recordings, add basic titles and animations and create a video party invitation. The QuickTime team (and Adobe Premiere) had brought us the Future, and we wanted to further distribute it. And have a party in the process.
But how could we distribute our Future party video invitation? One piece of the Future we planned to show at the party was “the Internet,” but that Future certainly wasn’t evenly distributed enough to use it to pass out our party invite.
As is often the case with new technologies, you need an old way and a new way. The old way: print and hand out paper invitations, which included the relevant frames from the video.
The new way: put a copy of the QuickTime video file on floppy disks, and hand those out.
As you can see (sort of), video size and quality have gotten a whole lot better since 1993. Despite the fact that the video was only 160×120 pixels, it still needed two (high-density) floppy disks for the full invitation!
After sending out our invitations, old and new, 33 years ago today, we were ready to party like it’s (way past) August 21, 1993…