While there are countless little-known videos on YouTube that are well worth a watch for any Apple fan, this Ghostbusters parody has to be one of the best. The clip was filmed for an International Sales Meeting held in 1984 and it sees a team called the “Blue Busters” free the world from IBM PCs and replace them with the Macintosh.
Of course, IBM — a company often referred to as the “Big Blue” — was Apple’s biggest rival at the time. YouTube user MajorKahuna claims he was at the event at which the Blue Busters film was played, where Apple also introduced its LaserWriter, one of the first laser printers available to the mass market:
I was there in Oct. 1984. This was not an internal ad. I was a 1984 state of the art multimedia slide show with audio by Ray Parker Jr. who sang the original. There were also live dancers on the stage.
This was the opening presentation of the International Sales Meeting that introduced the Lightwriter later renamed Laserwriter.
Apple always used a current movie as a them for the sales meetings. in 1985 it was Back to the Future.
The video was discovered by The Next Web, and is part of the world’s largest collection of historical Apple materials which was once donated to Stanford University:
Over twenty years ago, Apple started collating all of its old documents, books, software, videotapes and marketing materials with the intention of opening an Apple museum.
However, in 1997 — a time when Steve Jobs reprised his role as CEO at the company — plans were shelved and Apple officials contacted curators at Stanford University, offering to donate the collection to the school’s Silicon Valley Archives. After a couple of days, Stanford curators were at Apple HQ loading two moving trucks full of Apple’s old materials.
The Associated Press reports that the collection is now housed in a warehouse at a non-disclosed location. While many of its contents are still a mystery, some, such as the video above, have made their way onto the web. Here’s to hoping for more of these discoveries.
