It has been called the best Super Bowl commercial of all-time and certainly could rank as one of the most effective advertisements in history — for without it, the company might not even exist.

Today, Apple's

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[AAPL  Loading...      ()   ]"1984," which introduced the Macintosh to the world is celebrating its 25th anniversary.

Here's a look at this classic spot than ran during Super Bowl XVIII on Jan. 22, 1984.

The ad, which was produced by Chiat/Day, directed by Ridley Scott (fresh off Blade Runner) and alluded to George Orwell's "1984," has a great story behind it. For that, we went to Mike Murray, who was marketing manager of the Macintosh at the time.

Darren: What was the goal of the ad?

Murray: There was certainly the need for something revolutionary. That's what we were looking for to announce and introduce the Mac. And we obviously had the year "1984" and the George Orwell novel to go along with it.

Darren: The commercial was certainly seen as a risk at the time. What was the reaction internally before the spot ran?

Murray: The Apple board very clearly instructed us to never show that commercial and to sell the time (one 60-second spot and one 30-second spot) that we had purchased on the Super Bowl.

Darren: But, as the story goes, only the 30-second spot could be sold. So what happened then?

Murray: The board then instructed Steve (Jobs) to run an old Apple II ad or some other ad, but just don’t show that abominable "1984" commercial. Unfortunately, there was no other ad that would have made sense for Apple to run at that time, so we were “forced” to run the "1984" commercial one time during the Super Bowl.

Darren: So the ad was ready to go. How good was this Macintosh brand you were trying to get people to buy?

Murray: The Mac team knew we were on to something special with this little computer with a mouse and a friendly user interface – something that was radically different. It's hard to go back 25 years and understand how different computers were then. You had to really be quite the computer nerd to enjoy using a computer prior to the Mac. So this was revolutionary device.

Darren: So the ad runs. What was the reaction?

Murray: Well, we had to somehow show people and we wanted this radical commercial simply to get people's attention and to enter the word Macintosh into the lexicon of their vocabulary. We achieved that. In fact we overachieved that. The commercial in its entirety was shown as nightly news on the three major networks, which in those days were NBC, ABC and CBS. We moved from being public relations and advertising to actually news. Suddenly, it became something all of America needed to be paying attention to. We showed up on the cover of Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. It lifted the perception of apple as an innovator and it opened the door for thousands and thousands of Macintosh computers to be sold.

Darren: Why did the commercial seem to strike such a chord?

Murray: What that commercial did was it picked up on a particular vibe of a large segment of of American society. Young people, innovators, creative people, people who don’t want to feel like they’re just stuck in the masses. And we felt that way, but I think we also perhaps underestimated what a strong vibe that is.

Darren: How important was the ad itself. What I'm getting at is, did it really help sell computers?

Murray: Well, by positioning the Mac that way, as a product that’s different from everything else and as a product that’s different, yet a fun product, a creative product, it opened the door and allowed the Mac to survive. Going back 25 years there wasn’t much software, the product was small, it didn’t have expansion, all the things that we take for granted in computers today, even though it was an innovative product it was very limited in its capability. But somehow the imagery that ad created and the follow on marketing and the things we did related that to our marketing, allowed many people to believe in the Mac and here, 25 years later, the loyalty around this product is simply unheard of.

Darren: It's hard to look back like this, but could Apple have died as a company without this spot?

Murray: One has to assume that Apple would have seen an early demise. The Apple II, which was the main product at the time, was running out of gas. It was non-compatible with anything else on the market, it was really only appealing to the education market and it was a little but expensive. Without that 1984 commercial, it would have been very difficult for us to have gotten the attention for a product that really was so innovative at the time.

Darren: How important was Steve Jobs in the process?

Murray: There could never have been a Mac without Steve Jobs. There never could have been an Apple without Steve Jobs. Steve had the vision and tenacity and willpower to take this idea and turn it into a product and make the market believe in it.

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