Steve Jobs Dies: A Look Back At The Iconic Apple Television Ad That Aired During The 1984 Super Bowl (VIDEO)

UPDATE: Steve Jobs passed away on Oct. 5 2011. His innovations and impact, including this iconic Apple advertisement from the 1984 Super Bowl, will continue to affect the ways that we live our lives for generations.

The news that Steve Jobs was stepping down from his CEO position with Apple reverberated throughout the tech industry, triggering many reminiscences about how influential his products and his personality have been over the years.

While Jobs' legacy as an innovator in his field is assured, it is worth remembering that he also left an indelible mark on one of the biggest event's on the sports calendar: the Super Bowl.

During a break in the action in the third quarter of the 1984 Super Bowl, Jobs aired a landmark television ad that not only changed the course of Apple, but also helped usher in an age when the commercials were as much a part of Super Bowl Sunday as the game itself.

Directed by Ridley Scott, Apple's dystopian '1984' ad contended that only Apple, represented by a sort of buff Olivia Newton-John lookalike, could save personal computing from a bleak Orwellian future. It only aired once but it In 2004, Kevin Maney described the ad in USA Today as "one of those rare bolts of lightning that can mobilize a generation in a particular field the way John F. Kennedy's call for a man on the moon motivated the aerospace crowd, or Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein rallied young journalists with their Watergate investigation."

Not only did the Apple ad promise liberation from the faceless IBM monolith but it also promised liberation from boring games like that '84 Super Bowl when the Raiders routed the Redskins, 38-9.