There seems to be some kind of frenzy emerging on the Macintosh web and within the user group community concerning Apple’s upcoming 30th anniversary. You’d think that it is my kid’s birthday or something. The anniversary is on April 1st.

Anniversaries mean little to me, but they are the kind of fodder that the media and users feed on, so I offered to do a presentation to the MacWoburn User Group. It is simply a kind of historical walk about Apple Computer, Inc. through its QuickTime movies and commercials. As I had disks upon disks of these things saved, it wasn’t hard to copy them all to one DVD to use in the presentation. With little time to prepare, (ok, I could have started last year), I planned to show each file with a simple double-click, no iDVD creation for me; too long and too much time overhead.

Luckily, some more intense Mac fan than myself in the form of Nicholas Pyers from AUSOM Inc., Australia’s Leading Apple Macintosh User Group, created a short intro to his presentation, which I used as my ending summary to the evening. Thanks Nick! Unfortunately, the discussions that each viewing generated made the evening much longer than expected. We decided to continue the historical QuickTime walk at the April’s meeting. Now, my DVD was missing some files and that bothered me. As I got a reprieve with the second meeting, I could now dig up those files. One is an Apple employee made quirky little QuickTime called Black and Blue, and the other MIA is my switcher ad folder. Black and Blue is simply head shots of a number of employees morphing into each other while bouncing to some nice music.

After rifling through all my carefully stored backup CDs, I realized that many were still packed from my move 2 years ago. I decided to turn to the web to just download them all again. This might have been easier if I hadn’t found a few hundred megs of commercials that I didn’t have. So, a downloading I went. For days and days. A personal note here, my dog just died and I’m feeling really horrible, so this little task helped me stay focused on something and created sorely needed good humor in my life.

Well, this little task quickly turned into a major life’s work. My innocent search became a mild obsession. While the Web provided new commercials I didn’t have archived, little Apple-employee made movies just aren’t posted anywhere.

Well, after searching about 125 CDs and DVDs and a week of little sleep later, I found Black and Blue on a disc entitled, QuickTime: The CD (1992) by Sumeria. Lo and behold the music on the clip was created by Jim Reekes, the author of the Sosumi startup sound. As it happens Sosumi was the subject of much discussion in Blogs last year. My, what goes around comes around, doesn’t it?

I also uncovered, mostly on the Berkeley Mac User Group (BMUG) and BostonComputer Society•Mac User Group (BCS) CDs, rough-cut early QuickTime movies of the science fiction author Clifford Stoll, filmmaker Lenora Johanson, graphic designer Lynda Weinman, John Odam, Steve Wozniak, Former VP, ZDNet.com Stephen Howard-Sarin, former Editor of eMediaweekly and MacWEEK David Morgenstern, and former MacWeek writer Raines Cohen, QuickTime interviews with Jean-Louis Gassee and John Dvorak, AND the best bathroom in the Bay area!

My search also yielded a 1950s Maypo commercial buried on a CompuServe CD, a number of music videos on Apple marketing CDs, plus installers for every Mac OS ever produced. My own catching up with 30-years of Apple took me through early 1990s Developer and marketing CDs, the early years of the Apple Consultant program, and eWorld. It was certainly an interesting week. While the news media scrambles to interview people who experienced Apple’s history, I simply took a QuickTime walk through my own involvement with Apple since 1984, which thankfully, excluded that horrible stint I did as the Public Relations Manager for a Franklin Ace, i.e. anApple II clone, company in the early 1980s.

By the way, that DVD I created is now two.