Martin Scorsese’s iPad ad wasn’t the only Apple-related spot at last night’s Oscars. In addition, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak popped up in an advert for Cadillac, in which he was described as “a college dropout [who invented] the personal computer.”
Selective history notwithstanding (the Programma 101, Micral N and Altair all have claims to being the first personal computers, while the Commodore PET was the first mass-market model), the ad is particularly interesting given the recent news about a possible Apple Car.
Check out the ad after the jump:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGhaOV0BPmA
The commercial also includes fashion designer Jason Wu, American biologist Anne Wojcicki, entrepreneur Njeri Rionge, and Boyhood director Richard Linklater. Building on Cadillac’s current “Dare Greatly” ad campaign, the minute-long ad features Edith Piaf’s iconic song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” (No, I Regret Nothing), and boasts an appearance by the 2016 Cadillac CT6 flagship sedan, which Cadillac will officially unveil at the New York International Auto Show on March 31.
As a great fan of Woz, it’s fantastic to see him praised as such a different-thinking innovator on a widely-viewed show like the Academy Awards.
With that said, given his love of Tesla cars, wouldn’t it be kind of ironic to see him turn around and give the money from his Caddy paycheck to Elon Musk?
Source: GMAuthority
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
2 responses to “Cadillac ad credits Woz with inventing the personal computer”
has GM, gotten anything right?? LOL just wait till Thursday as they announce another recall, they might just recall this commercial too ;)
I think Cadillac is not out of line by saying Woz invented the personal computer. There were a number of machine in the 1960s and 70s leading up to the Apple I/II, but most of which I wouldn’t associate with the hobbyist movement of the mid-to-late 1970s.
The Programma 101 was a business machine that cost $20,000 in 1965…cheap for a computer in those days but hardly something you’d find in somebody’s house when it was on the market. The Micral N was a process control mini computer designed to compete with DEC PDPs of the day…again, hardly a hobbyist machine when it was released. The Altair 8800 certainly was pitched to the hobbyist market way back in 1974 and was a landmark machine. It had a microprocessor and a expandable bus architecture. But it was also not approachable to the casual user. You programmed it with switches, much like minicomputers of the day.
Woz’s Apple II came with a case, a keyboard, and an interface to use a CRT TV as a monitor. A personal computer needs to be flexible enough to be programmed by the user for general purpose tasks, and It came with a BASIC that was approachable with examples. You could use a cassette drive for storage and later, a floppy disk that was a big advance at the time since it came at a lower price than previous solutions (although $495 was still a lot of money).
Commodore’s PET computer was announced before the Apple II shipped in 1977 but didn’t actually ship until months afterward. Lastly, the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc shipped for the Apple II which cemented it’s place in history for commercial software usable by the home or business user.