Certainly the most memorable computer commercial of all time was Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl advertisement, with slack-jawed drones watching an Orwellian speaker on a huge screen smashed with a hammer flung by an admirably athletic young woman. The advertisement, directed by Ridley Scott of Blade Runner fame, railed against “unification of thought,” and promised that the Macintosh would prevent 1984 …

I thought up the “Ten Wow” strategy in a previous life on a sales trip to Redmond. I was president of a small software company barely clinging to life and sorely needing a big sale with a trophy client. We were the third of three companies presenting, three days each, and I felt like our presentation and product demonstration needed …

[Author’s note: This article is from 2001, and some of the original images are gone. I’ve used the thumbnails from the Extremetech article here. Sorry for the low quality. The article is of limited value now, though square pixels continues to be a concept that confuses many producers, and aspect ratio mismatches continue to appear both on TV and on …