Tech Time Warp of the Week: Watch Jeff Goldblum Sell the World on Apple…And This Crazy Email Thing

Today, Apple is an unstoppable juggernaut of technology, setting the agenda for the vast world of mobile computing---and more. But in 1999, its situation was rather different. There was no iPad, no iPhone, and no iPod. Steve Jobs had returned to the company only two years earlier, having been exiled back in 1985. The iMac, released in 1998, was the first major product launch after Jobs' return, and its success was anything but guaranteed. It was time to unload the secret weapon: Jeff Goldblum.

Today, Apple is a juggeraut, setting the agenda for the vast world of mobile computing---and more. But in 1999, its situation was rather different. There was no iPad, no iPhone, and no iPod. Steve Jobs had returned to the company only two years earlier, having been exiled back in 1985. The iMac, released in 1998, was the first major product launch after Jobs' return, and its success was anything but guaranteed. It was time to unload the secret weapon: Jeff Goldblum.

In 1999, Apple tapped Goldblum---the star of science fiction classics like The Fly and Jurassic Park---to sell the world not only on this colorful new computer, but on the internet itself. Yes, there was the "Drunk Jeff Goldblum" ad, but was only part of the fun.

Nowadays, it seems that just about everyone has some sort of a web presence, in the form of a Facebook or LinkedIn profile if nothing else. But in 2000, when Apple launched its iTools web hosting and email service to complement the iMac, this was a rare thing. Sure, free web hosting services like Geocities had been around for years by that point, but even though millions of people used those services, they weren't necessarily what you'd call mainstream. Apple, as you can see in the Goldblum video above, had to make building a website not only easy, but also desirable.

It may seem obvious in the age of Facebook that sharing photos would be a prime motivation for building a web page, but it was a surprisingly fresh angle at the time. After all, it can be hard to remember, as inundated as we are now with email, that just having an email address used to be novel:

But Apple had greater ambitions for the iMac than just email and photo sharing. The company also introduced iMovie at this time, which made it easy to edit digital video. We're partial to the Amiga software Video Toaster for bringing video editing to the masses in 1990, but iMovie arguably did more to popularize home video editing and the later YouTube revolution than any other single piece of software:

The most unusual thing about the iMac, though, was probably that it came in several different colors at a time when almost computers were beige. Candy color computers haven't quite caught on, but thanks to Apple---and Jeff Goldblum---beige boxes are something of a rarity these days, having been mostly replaced by black and silver designs.

Yes, these ads get hokey. The most bizarre video is probably the one about Apple's financing options. Apple's products have always been on the spendy side, so Goldblum makes the case for the cost of about three pizzas per month, you too can own an iMac. "Hot fresh out of the box!" he says. "You can even put anchovies on it."

As for Goldblum, you can still see him on television shows like Portlandia and movies like The Grand Budapest Hotel. But he's also kept us his side gig as a hawker of high tech products. In 2012, he did a few spots for PayPal and, of course, you can find so many new incarnations of Drunk Jeff Goldblum. So much fun. So little time.