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Lin 3 With its abstract message of individuality and freedom in place of any specific product claims, "1984" has far outlived the machine it was made to promote (Apple even resurrected it twenty years later in 2004, cheekily giving the runner a pair of its trademark white iPod headphones). Swift and nimble in spite of her massive payload, the runner became the most potent symbol of the distributed, individual, and personal revolution that swept the computing world over the next decade. With its legion of faceless drones and overbearing Orwellian authority, the ad also helped to cement a contrasting view of mainframe computing as monolithically conformist, strictly hierarchical, and corporate, the very enemy of discordant diversity. This binary has proved remarkably resilient. The dim view of the mainframe echoed fears of earlier decades, of machines become too powerful to the despair of their creators-of HAL 9000 and Colossus and the Strangelovean Doomsday Device. With the dramatic downfall of mainframes and the corresponding ascension of personal computers, "1984" became prophecy, further reinforcing its divergent diptych. Moving forward, it has served as a useful foil for the new heroes of the PC revolution: Cambridge hackers, Menlo Park counterculturalists, and ascendant garage enterprises from Los Altos to Albuquerque. The ideas that they