In January 1984, I was watching the Super Bowl the way most of the country was — half paying attention, waiting for the game more than the commercials. Then, in one break, a woman in track shorts sprinted into a gray, fluorescent-lit hall full of identical, shaved-head zombies listening to Big Brother drone from a giant screen. She swung a sledgehammer overhead and threw it through the screen. White light. Silence. A voiceover said something about January 24th, and that was it. Sixty seconds. Not one shot of an actual computer.
I wasn’t in the tech industry. I was sitting in a corporate job with more layers of approval than that commercial had seconds of runtime, and something about watching that hammer connect felt like it was aimed at my building, not some fictional dystopia on a screen.
