Tony Blair brought the British Labour Party back to power by welding the word "new" onto the seemingly unelectable term "Labour". Hey presto, Labour is back. "New Labour". Now, one of the superpowers of 1980s computer technology, Apple, is back . And it appears that Apple is back because Steve Jobs is back.
Steve Jobs is Mr Apple, having founded the company with Steve Wozniak. With the company back under his control, Apple launched its "revolutionary" iMac computer and announced profits of $106 million, ending a losing streak which dogged the company since Jobs was forced out of the boardroom in the mid-eighties. The iMac was an immediate success. CompUSA announced that many stores had sold out on the first day and described the iMac as "the biggest launch we've seen in our history".
If Apple's current success seems based on its success in the past, as evinced by the messianic return of Jobs, then his own role today also harks back to his earlier incarnation as computer tsar. He was, in a decade of golden boys, the golden boy in the gold rush market of computer technology.
In one of Apple's corporate films, designed to hype the soon-to-fail project Lisa, he looks like the annoyingly yuppie Tom Cruise of such Jobsian films as Risky Business and Cocktail. Jobs plays the host of a blind date show where three players in the computer industry try to win over Lisa. One of the men is the token geek, the sad twerp whose off-the-wall comments usually win the girl despite the audience's protests. But the geek was Bill Gates, who really did walk away with the prize when Microsoft adopted the slick graphic user interface of the Apple for its Windows operating system for the PC.
Apple mired itself in a legal tussle with Microsoft over the copyright to the presentational features of its work. By this stage Jobs had been kicked out of the boardroom. In the wilderness, Jobs showed he still had the golden touch, taking credit for Pixar, the digital animation company responsible for Toy Story. During this period, his reputation was being preserved and embellished by fiercely loyal Macintosh users who despaired at the lack of direction of their company.
Finally, Apple got Jobs back, or vice versa. But now he is "new Steve Jobs", successful independently of Apple, an older and wiser man.
The return of both Apple and Jobs, and the way in which they prey on users' nostalgia for past successes points up one of the
more interesting features of current technology. Jobs's role as Apple messiah and the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft are topics which circulate on the Internet. But more than old stories are preserved there.
Emulators exist for many of the home computers of the 1980s, allowing PC users to downsize their more powerful machines to old 48K and 64K machines. The advances in power and speed allow the user to enjoy again the wonder of games played on computers with palettes of eight colours.
Apple has taken stock of this computer nostalgia, in employing Jobs as a touchstone to its past success and in the design and marketing of the iMac. Its very newness harks back to the past. Its advertising describes it as a "design classic . . . the most talked-about computer since the original Macintosh."
The launch of the iMac is a chance to experience again the invention and hype associated with computer launches of the 1980s. It affords the opportunity to buy into that nostalgic event of purchasing a computer: one which might take off putting you in the vanguard of its success or in the event of its failing to sell, leaving you as the cult follower of another extinct machine.