On the 24th of January 1984, the Apple Macintosh was launched. Two days before, on the 22nd, the Mac is introduced to the world in a now-legendary TV commercial aired during Super Bowl XVIII.
The 60-second spot featured a female athlete running through a dystopian landscape inspired by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, to throw a sledgehammer at a TV image of Big Brother, meant, in this case, to represent IBM. It ends with the promise, "On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984."
The ad, the brainchild of the Chiat/Day advertising agency, played well when shown to an Apple sales conference in 1983. But the company's board of directors balked and ordered the ad withdrawn from its Super Bowl slot. Only the intervention of Steve Wozniak, who said he'd pay for the spot personally if the board refused to air it, saved the day.
The commercial aired nationally only once, but its creativity and impact on the product prompted Advertising Age to select it as the "Commercial of the Decade." The ad is also credited with beginning the annual creative orgy that characterizes modern Super Bowl commercials.
The Macintosh project started in the late 1970s with Jef Raskin, an Apple employee, who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer. He wanted to name the computer after his favorite type of apple, the McIntosh, but the name had to be changed for legal reasons.
The design caught the attention of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. Realizing that the Macintosh was more marketable than the Lisa, he began to focus his attention on the project. Raskin finally left the Macintosh project in 1981 over a personality conflict with
Jobs, and the final Macintosh design is said to be closer to Jobs’ ideas than Raskin’s. After hearing of the pioneering GUI technology being developed at Xerox PARC, Jobs had negotiated a visit to see the Xerox Alto computer and Smalltalk development tools in exchange for Apple stock options. The Lisa and Macintosh user interfaces were partially influenced by technology seen at Xerox PARC and were combined with the Macintosh group's own ideas.Jobs also commissioned industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger to work on the Macintosh line, resulting in the "Snow White" design language; although it came too late for the earliest Macs, it was implemented in most other mid- to late-1980s Apple computers.However, Jobs’ leadership at the Macintosh project was short-lived; after an internal power struggle with new CEO John Sculley, Jobs angrily resigned from Apple in 1985, went on to found NeXT, another computer company, and did not return until 1997.
Sources: Wired.com and WikiPedia