The Airport technology was introduced in 1999 but only during the following year Apple managed to have all of the Macintosh line officially capable to use WiFi networking.

Logo AirportIn 2000 not only iBooks but also iMacs, PowerBooks and Power Macs supported an internal Airport card and could connect to Apple’s Airport Base using the 802.11b standard.

To showcase the possibilities of wireless networking Apple put online a demo, a small game in QuickTime made by Greg Gilman using LiveStage Pro (according to the movie properties). The game showed the plan of a flat and, on the left, three big buttons.

You could click the first button to choose a Mac and then drag it to the diagram on the right while clicking the second button and dragging you could add AirPort cards to the Macs.

Finally, a click to the third button would show an Airport Base: as soon as it was dropped anywhere inside of the house (or even outside, which was unrealistic) the demo would show the transmitting waves of WiFi transmission.

The Internet Archive has copies of Apple’s website including the Airport Demo page but the QuickTime Movie is missing.

Fortunately if you search a bit you can find a copy of just the .mov file on a third party website so that ten years after you can still “Get unwired” and play with Apple’s Airport technology.

The Airport logo and Apple.com website are “Courtesy of Apple”.