Think "Different Job" (10/14/97)
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Curiously enough, despite Steve Jobs' manic glee with his pet project known to us mere mortals as the "Think Different" ad campaign, the man who came up with the slogan itself has apparently been laid off. MacInsider has the exclusive, including Sam Wood's departure letter to his colleagues.

We can only assume that Steve feels the campaign is his and his alone. Reports of his involvement in the campaign's progress are voluminous. For one, we've heard that the reason there were two showings of the same commercial during the Toy Story ABC broadcast (instead of the expected two separate ads) was due to Steve pulling the second ad at the last minute, because he wasn't entirely happy with it. Also, the voiceover is done by Richard Dreyfuss, but Mac the Knife and others have reported that the original cut had the voice of Steve himself. And the very first time the phrase "Think Different" appeared to the public was during Steve's keynote at the MacWorld Expo last August. Perhaps in the past couple of months, he's assimilated it entirely from its original source. We're sorry to hear of another long-standing Apple employee losing his job.

One last thing-- we had always assumed that the arguable ungrammaticality of Apple's new catch phrase was an intentional irony and a marketing hook, but after reading Wood's farewell letter (in which he urges his coworkers to "most important, keep the dream alive"), we're starting to think it was just an adjective-instead-of-adverb mistake after all. Fancy that.

 
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The above scene was taken from the 10/14/97 episode:

October 14, 1997: (Sorry—this was before we started writing intro text for each episode!)

Other scenes from that episode:

  • 84: Hot Cocoa for Kids (10/14/97)   Several months ago, we at AtAT downloaded a keen little application called Cocoa Player, that allowed us to view projects assembled with Cocoa, an Apple multimedia authoring environment for kids. (Think "Macromedia Director for Little'uns.") After playing with the winning entries in Apple's "Win an eMate" contest, including a full-fledged multi-part game put together by a grade-school girl, we were suitably impressed...

  • 85: thessaSOURCE Next? (10/14/97)   We reported yesterday on the recent MacOS Rumors server outage, stating our conspiracy theory that they had been "silenced" for their breaking coverage of the proposed Oracle-Apple merger. Well, apparently the big guys have gotten to the sites' administrators, because they've publicly announced on MacInsider that the outage is the result of "disagreements" between the Rumors staff and their ISP...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...

Vote Early, Vote Often!
Why did you tune in to this '90s relic of a soap opera?
Nostalgia is the next best thing to feeling alive
My name is Rip Van Winkle and I just woke up; what did I miss?
I'm trying to pretend the last 20 years never happened
I mean, if it worked for Friends, why not?
I came here looking for a receptacle in which to place the cremated remains of my deceased Java applets (think about it)

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