Technology History | Flint Center — The Computer Came Out of a Bag and Introduced Itself

The building that stood on this spot is gone, and the demonstration it is remembered for took one morning.

On 24 January 1984 Steve Jobs walked onto the stage of the Flint Center at De Anza College, in front of Apple's annual shareholders' meeting, and took a beige computer out of a canvas bag.

Then he stepped back and let it introduce itself, in a synthesised voice, to a hall of about 2,400 people.

The Macintosh had 128 kilobytes of memory, a nine-inch monochrome screen at 512 by 342, a Motorola 68000, one 3.5-inch floppy drive and a mouse — and no hard disk at all.

It went on sale that day at $2,495. Jobs had wanted $1,995; John Sculley set the higher figure to fund the advertising, and that extra $500 a machine is why the launch is remembered as much for its commercial as its computer.

The commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, had run two days earlier during Super Bowl XVIII on 22 January.

It is usually described as airing only once, which is not quite right. It had already been shown on 31 December 1983 on KMVT in Twin Falls, Idaho, a placement bought so the ad would qualify for that year's awards.

Apple kept coming back to this hall for three decades, up to the Apple Watch introduction in 2014, because it was less than a mile from the offices on Bandley Drive and it held a crowd.

The Flint Center opened in 1971, five storeys of concrete with roughly 84,200 square feet and a fly tower, and it was never really Apple's — De Anza College ran it for graduations, symphonies and community events.

Structural, seismic and accessibility assessments put the repair bill above $49 million, and the district's board voted on 10 June 2019 to close it permanently.

Demolition crews opened the west wall, the side facing the parking structure, in early October 2024 and finished in the following months.

What a visitor finds today is a cleared site on the north edge of the campus off Stevens Creek Boulevard, waiting on a replacement event centre, with the Flint Center parking garage still standing 130 metres to the west and still carrying the name.

Cover: the Flint Center photographed before demolition. The second photograph shows Jobs with a Macintosh in January 1984; the picture drawn on its screen is a version of a woodblock print by Hashiguchi Goyō.

Photos: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0; Bernard Gotfryd, public domain (Library of Congress), via Wikimedia Commons.