Thumbs up kid Brent Rambo from Apple promo video now works at Facebook

A brief spot in a promotional video more than 20 years ago ended up making Brent Rambo an internet star and is still attracting attention.

A boy who unwittingly became a meme commonly used to indicate support or approval is apparently doing fine despite his acting career being over.

Brent Rambo (in addition to having a cool as hell name) was the breakout star of a promotional video for Apple computers in the early ‘90s, despite only having a brief cameo.

Towards the end of the video, he’s a kid having fun on a Mac computer in his classroom, writing to then Apple CEO John Sculley to tell him what a big fan he is.

Brent Rambo starred in a video for Apple in his youth but it took a couple decades to go viral.

“Dear Mr Sculley, Mac rules the world. Your Mac friend, Brent Rambo,” he said before giving a big thumbs up to the camera.

The technology that made him a star didn’t exist when the video was made and it took close to two decades before he would rise to prominence.

In 2013, an animated gif of his moment of approval was posted to Reddit, where it quickly became a meme thanks to its ‘90s aesthetic and Mr Rambo’s over-the-top acting.

It’s now a commonly used reaction gif and can be easily found on the GIPHY keyboard and database Facebook acquired earlier this year in a deal worth around $US400 million ($A525 million).

In a strange twist, it’s now emerged Mr Rambo also works at Facebook.

TIL this guy works at Facebook pic.twitter.com/UpxG1hAIXk

— Benny Wong (@bdotdub) December 17, 2020

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On Friday morning, Instagram engineer Benny Wong shared his discovery that Mr Rambo is also a Facebook employee, a fact he is “still shook” by.

Other Facebook employees and those in the tech space quickly chimed in to confirm the story on the quasi-rival social media platform.

“He was in my new hire class and I was shook too,” Facebook staffer Sara Zhang wrote on Twitter.

“You should look up the welcome post on Workplace,” Facebook product designer Gordon Mei suggested. “Everyone had a day with that one.”

Well-known tech leaker Jane Manchun Wong, who doesn’t work at Facebook but often reveals what it’s working on before it gets a chance to, also said she’d confirmed his employment there.

It’s not that hard after all, it’s right there on his LinkedIn page.

Brent Rambo among a number of popular "thumbs up" reaction gifs on GIPHY.

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Since January, Mr Rambo has been the world’s biggest social media platform’s director of network engineering and infrastructure.

It’s the latest in a two decade strong career in technology Mr Rambo describes as “nonlinear”, beginning with roles at a wind power start-up in the 90s that led to a director of network engineering role at Sun Microsystems as the Dotcom bubble was bursting in 2000, where he developed technology “similar to what Amazon Web Services does today”.

Sadly, by his telling, Mr Rambo “delivered the technology five years before the market was ready”.

He later spent two years as the vice-president of technology at Sony Online Entertainment.

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He recreated the scene as an adult.

It was during his time in this position that the meme, based on the promotional film from more than 20 years ago, began going viral.

It wasn’t long before keen-eyed Redditors tracked Mr Rambo down.

Sony’s massively multi-player online game Planetside 2 was peaking in popularity at the time, and fans spotted Mr Rambo in an episode of a behind the scenes Twitch web series where he recreated the thumbs up gesture.

He later showed up in Reddit threads answering some questions people had — including whether he still thought Mac rule the world.

He said he uses a variety of operating systems as part of his job but that the Macbook is “without a doubt my favourite system to travel with”.

Mr Rambo admitted he was now more brand agnostic and in reality is “just a tech junkie”.