It was expensive and underpowered, but the Apple Macintosh still changed the world John Naughton

Forty years ago this week, on 22 January 1984, a stunning advertising video was screened during the Super Bowl broadcast in the US. It was directed by Ridley Scott and evoked the dystopian atmosphere of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Long lines of grey, shaven zombies march in lockstep through a tunnel into a giant amphitheatre, where they sit in rows gawping up at a screen on which an authoritarian figure is intoning a message. "Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the information purification directives," he drones. "We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology."