As the tech world celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh last Friday, we were reminded – time and again – of the iconic Super Bowl ad that announced the arrival of Apple's world-changing machine. During the 1984 Super Bowl broadcast, director Ridley Scott famously portrayed the Mac as a blond woman in orange shorts who upends an Orwellian world where gray, androgynous, drone-like humans march in lock-step to the oppressive tenets of an all-powerful Big Brother – aka IBM. It was one of the great moments in the history of Silicon Valley.

But few remember that a year later, during the 1985 Super Bowl, Apple fell flat on its face.

In 1985, Steve Jobs and company ran a TV ad called Lemmings, which you can watch above. The ad once again painted the IBM crowd as drone-like humans under a godawful spell, and it aimed to ramp up interest in Apple's latest brainstorm: the Macintosh Office. The only trouble is the ad actually turned people off, not on – and the product it pitched wouldn't be ready for years.

With Mac Office, Apple was combining its desktop machines with a laser printer and a filer server, hoping to spawn the business office of the future. But the file server – the most important element, the thing needed to let you share files between machines – wasn't finished. It didn't ship until 1987.

>'The product simply did not exist. And if you write a check with your advertising that your product can't cash, you will – I assure you – bite the karmic weenie.' Steve Hayden

"The product simply did not exist. And if you write a check with your advertising that your product can't cash, you will – I assure you – bite the karmic weenie," Steve Hayden, the co-creator of the 1984 ad and the copywriter for Lemmings, said last week during an anniversary bash for the Macintosh. "We bit it big time."

In the ad, the drones have traded in their "1984" jumpsuits for business suits – and bluish blindfolds. They're still under the evil spell of Big Blue, and only Apple can save them from the hell of IBM PCs and DOS. Like lemmings, they walk in lockstep along a barren path toward the edge of a cliff, humming "Hi ho, Hi ho, it’s off to work we go."

After a few plunge to their deaths, we hear the voiceover: "On January 23, Apple will introduce the Macintosh Office." That's when one lemming stops just a few inches from the precipice, takes off his blindfold, and stares into the sky, where a light begins to break through the clouds. Then he turns toward the other lemmings moving toward him. The choice is clear: Live with Apple or die with IBM. "You can look into it or you can go on with business as usual," the voiceover says.

Sadly, you couldn't look into it. It didn't exist. And, well, people weren't really compelled to look anyway. According to Hayden, the ad was a flop. People found it offensive, and when it was shown on the big screen at Stanford Stadium during the Super Bowl, there was dead silence – something very different from the cheers that greeted "1984" a year earlier.

Steve Jobs had front row seats at the stadium, witnessing the debacle first hand. And he learned his lesson: Never call your customers lemmings – especially when you don't have anything to sell them.