The Flint Center, where several key Apple events have been held, including the 1984 unveiling of the original Macintosh, is now rubble. Apple held its last event there in 2014, when the Cupertino company introduced its Apple Watch.
On January 24, 1984, Jobs took the Flint Center stage to introduce the first Macintosh to the world. You can see the unveiling in the YouTube below.
The original Macintosh (which sold for $2,495 USD) was powered by a Motorola 68000 processor running at almost 8MHz, and had 128K of RAM to work with. The Macintosh had a 9-inch Black and White monitor with a fixed resolution of 512×342 pixels, and used a single 400 KB 3 1/2-inch floppy drive.
The time between 1984 and now have not been kind to the Flint Center. As reported by SiliconValley.com, by 2015 the center was only being booked 17% to 24% of the time. Among those bookings, only seven events a year had more than 2,000 attendees, in a facility that had a capacity of 2,400.
The building had fallen into disrepair and it would have cost an estimated $50 million to update the facility, leading to the decision to demolish in 2019. The site is now being demolished.
Demolition is expected to be finished by March 2025, and the district has plans to build a new multi-million Creative Arts Building in its place, as well as an adjacent Student Services building.
The building projects will be funded by Measure G, provides $898 million for upgrading and repairing facilities, classrooms and labs, as well as acquiring and constructing facilities and equipment for De Anza and Foothill College. The Measure was approved by district voters in 2020.
(Image credit: Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)