Watch Steve Jobs play FDR in Apple film

That clip is from an eight-and-a-half-minute film entitled "1944," as well on the blog, that was Apple's in-house takeoff on "1984," the iconic first Macintosh TV ad that caused a sensation while that year's Super Bowl. Set as a World War II tale of good vs. IBM, it is a broadcast-quality production that was designed to fire up Apple's international sales force at a 1984 meeting in Hawaii.

Copy of 1944

A copy of "1944" was provided to me by one-time Apple employee Craig Elliott, formerly the head of Packeteer, and now CEO of Pertino Networks, a cloud-computing startup located two blocks from Apple in Cupertino.

Elliott, who worked at Apple from 1985 to 1996, says he has "never seen anywhere else" and that there had been "no additional circulation" as far as he knows. I couldn't find it online, either - the year 1984 was pre-World Wide Web, clearly -- which doesn't mean it isn't out there.

Two snippets from "1944," without any dialogue, do appear in another Jobs video - a photo-montage tribute to him made by Apple employees to mark his 30th birthday. Afterwards Jobs died last October, Elliott posted that birthday video to his Facebook page, from where it went viral earlier being knocked off the 'Net by Sony Music Entertainment because it used a Bob Dylan song.

Anyone who's seen the TV commercial no doubt will recognize in "1944" the reprised role of the female hammer thrower, though I'm not sure if it's to tell the truth the athlete and actress Anya Major from "1984." And, if you recall, Apple's famous ad ended with a narrator intoning: "On January 24th, Apple Computer will release Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984.' " This motivational film begins: "On January 24, 1984, Apple Computer introduced Macintosh. And we saw why 1984 was like ... 1944."

The key roles in 1944

While professional actors play the key roles in "1944," there are other Apple employees moreover Jobs on screen, including Mike Murray, at that time vice president of marketing, as The General, according to Elliott. Because allegations that Macintosh lacked software had dogged Apple prior to its release, the film takes pains in several places to counter that criticism, including purported pledges of support from Microsoft's Bill Gates, as so then as Mitch Kapor of pre-IBM Lotus Development Corp. The crate smashed open by the hammer thrower in the film spills a pile of software.