At the time, I hated using these things. Mac OS 9 would lock up unexpectedly (generally Windows wouldn’t blue screen while simply typing up a document whereas these iMacs would just freeze, requiring you to stick a paperclip into a hole like ejecting a CD drive manually). The keyboard was terrible, mouse was worse and the speakers were only good to play notification dings.
This author of the article has some real rose-tinted glasses.
MacOS was just about as jank as Windows 9x by my recollection.
The screen was nice, the USB support was nice. I didn’t hate the keyboard, though I was used to an IBM Model M so I hammered those keys…
It was such an iconic machine. Ironically, at the time I hated them. (I probably still wouldn’t want to use one even now, but now I only have to look at pictures of them, and they admittedly are nice to look at.)
I had a friend in high school whose family had one of these in their living room, and it was running OS 9. It was practically useless, but I forget what he did on it. I seem to remember that it ran World of Warcraft, but now I’m questioning my memory if that was really possible or not.
I like iMac’s colorful design. It really stood out from the beige-grey PC’s back then. My dream would be to build a sleeper PC inside the iMac.
His family also got the first iMac running OS X, and that was such a beauty to behold. I mean, maybe the design wasn’t as colorful or iconic as the G4 generation, but man that OS was sweet.
Love the way it looks. It’s peak late 90s but I think it would be cool if apple revisited that style in some of their newer tech
This came out when I was still in elementary school. I remember at the time the computer guru people were like, “It’s not a real computer, it doesn’t even have a 3 1/2” floppy drive. How can it be a computer without a floppy disk?" And people bought into that sentiment because Apple of the 90s was a company with no new ideas that was almost dead.
From an LA Times article, “Wait, did I really say “no floppy”? I did. This is probably the biggest gamble. Third-party vendors will no doubt develop a floppy that will attach via one of the iMac’s universal serial bus ports for connecting peripheral devices. (USB is a successor to a range of ports used previously on PCs and Macs.) My guess is that Apple is wrong about home users–most will still want a floppy (or zip drive) and will have to buy an add-on.”
I thought it was kind of neat to not have a floppy because even in those days 1.44MB was pathetically small and there were competing standards for a floppy replacement around 100-120MB range.
I think the biggest influence, besides killing off floppy drive was that this also killed beige PCs. Everybody shit on Apple for their new design but then in a few years they were all putting different colors on their cases and nobody had beige computers anymore.
I never got to use one until almost a decade later, in undergrad, where they were still in use at the kiosks for free internet in the student center. That’s where I finally learned to despise the puck mouse.
