1984

IBM commercial from 1984.Screenshot: IBMBefore the year 2000, Super Bowl commercials from tech companies offered millions of viewers their first glimpses of the future. Gizmodo watched dozens of videos from the 1980s and ‘90s to find the most iconic Super Bowl commercials from the early tech industry.Fax machines, internet connections, and Nokia phones may sound outdated now, but they used to be the cutting edge. These ads are far different from the tech commercials you’ll see in this year’s Super Bowl. We had to pull…

We are all the sledgehammer, Apple does like to tell its fans. We are all disruptors hurtling toward one great screen, breaking the iron-fisted hold that other tech firms want to impose on us. The hellscape dystopia world of Apple’s famed “1984” commercial modeled after George Orwell’s seminal dystopia 1984 never really came to pass. As silly as it is to say, Apple was right. We didn’t win some nebulous liberation, exactly. We won a whole different soup of tech-based dystopia.The M3 MacBook Pro: Made Dark for…

Pervasive and escalating sociopolitical problems widen divides between communities and sometimes push one to stand against the mighty State. In such contexts, the focus of the public and even academia is limited to two questions: could any solutions be found for the sociopolitical problems, and what means did the community adopt to go against the State. More often than not, a community is labelled terrorist and anti national when it goes against the mainstream and the State. What happens to the community’s sense of…

In the archives and manuscripts section of the British Library in London, the item identified as ADD MS 89154/11/21 is a small notebook. This notebook is 4 x 6 inches with a black and white print on the cover that says “The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood.” The first entry in the notebook begins: “Nov 1st. And so, suddenly, I’m off to India. The last time I had gone it was because of another death — that of Sanjay.” No Photography Allowed: A drawing by Amitava Kumar of Shiva Naipaul’s notebook stored in the British Library.…