In 1993, my freshman year in college, I attended a meeting of the Notre Dame MadMacs user group. I can’t tell you a single other thing about that evening, but I remember that they played a video (on a computer! no way!!) from a company I’d never heard of. On screen an animation depicted a hand opening up to reveal (as I remember) an eye on its palm. “Imagine what you can create,” read an arcing line of text above the hand. And below, “Create what you can imagine. Adobe.” Whoever these guys are, I thought, I have to know more.
I don’t know whether that piece was done in After Effects*, but there’s a good chance it was. Now Todd Kopriva from the AE team has posted an AE 1.1 demo reel from ’93:

You’ve come a long way, baby. [Via]
* AE became an Adobe product the following year