Happy birthday to blue, happy birthday to blue, happy birthday dear iMaaaaaaaaaac, happy birthday to blue. Hard as it may be to believe, ten years ago today, the first iMac began shipping into customers’ hands everywhere.
A lot’s happened in the past ten years: we’ve been through a software transition, a hardware transition, the birth of the iPod, the iPhone, and the iMac itself has gone through two more design evolutions. But let us cast ourselves back, adrift in time, to that more innocent day.
For a kick, sit back and enjoy this seven minute video of Steve Jobs introducing the original iMac. Marvel at all the hair he has! The slick suit! The bragging about 32MB of memory and a 4Mbp IrDA port! Not to mention touting a “great, great keyboard and mouse” (*wince*).
There’s no question to me that the iMac was the beginning of Apple’s—and Steve Jobs’s—second wind. The vibe in that video is clearly reminiscent of the original Macintosh’s introduction in 1984, and with the iMac even proclaiming “Hello (again)” at the end, that’s a feeling that Jobs obviously engineered with care. The iMac ushered in the death of the floppy, the rise of the Internet, the birth of USB, and an entirely new era of industrial design, courtesy our boy Jonathan Ive.
Me, I remember reading the issue of Macworld—in those days, the Internet was called “magazines”—that first showed the new iMac while sitting in my high school library, just a few short weeks before graduation. I don’t think I can claim the prescience of knowing that this was the beginning of something huge for Apple, but I definitely remember a feeling that the company was not nearly as dead as the critics would have had us believe. And, from a personal standpoint, it felt right: even as I was about to make a major life transition, from high school to college, Apple was in the process of changing as well.
How about you, dear readers: where were you when the iMac burst onto the scene in all its Bondi blueness?
Hey, me too. I started college in 1998 and I was so jealous that people were getting iMacs shipped to them in the dorm while I pecked away at my old Performa. My mom finally bought me one a year later when they went to G3 and stopped using that horrible mouse! I still have it (dark blue). It works, but I don't use it. Start the bidding now :)
10 years ago I hardly had any idea that something like the internet even existed.
Once my dad picked up an Indigo iMac though, I was hooked.
My biondi blue iMac was my first new computer since my Mac Classic. It introduced me to the web, email, digital music and photography. I was able to update it with more ram, a 20Gig hard drive, and an external cd-rw. That machine saw me all the way to 10.1. I still remember my father sitting down at my desk and saying "Damn, how are you ever going to fill up a 4 Gig hard drive?" It was the first time I had ever had a faster computer than him. He ran out and got a G3 tower not long after.
I have had several machines since then, but hold a special place for my old iMac.
I graduated from highschool in June 1998. That ensuing fall/winter, I went back to help set up all the new Macs. The first to tricle in were the Bondi iMacs in September, then the weird-ass all-in-one G3s with the side-by-side Zip and floppy slots, and then the frosted blue G3 towers that I wanted oh so badly. Unfortunately, they were priced a little out of my reach, so I used my graduation haul on a PC, which was thge worst mistake I ever made :(
I was in college in my PC period at the time, but I remember thinking the iMac (and later the G3 tower) was fantastic design. I definitely wished other computer makers would learn something from Apple's design sense.
I did use iMacs and G3s on campus, though. While I never felt the intense hatred of the original iMac mouse, I still didn't really care for it (I heavily use the second button).
10 years ago I was probably waiting in line to get into a club because that was social networking at the time. My biondi blue iMac still works, often more reliably than I do. None of the PCs I've owned since work, except for the last one I built myself. It's black. How boring, how un-biondi.