Filed under: iMac, Apple, Apple History
Happy Birthday, iMac
Yes, it's time once again to say "Happy Birthday" to our old friend, iMac. Hard to believe the iMac has been around for 10 years today. Apple transitioned the "consumer device," as Steve called it at its introduction, into something more of an icon of computer design. Above is a commercial for the iMac G3 which shipped in Lime, Grape, Blueberry, Tangerine, and Strawberry and featured the song "She's a Rainbow" by the Rolling Stones.
The specs for the original iMac were nothing to laugh about then, but it's certainly laughable now. The G3 iMac sported a 15" CRT monitor (resolution of 1024x768), 4 GB hard drive, 233 MHz PPC G3 (750), 32 MB of RAM (expandable up to 128, whoa!), 56 Kbps modem, 24x tray-loading CD-ROM drive, Mac OS 8.1 (or 8.5 on later models). This monster weighed in at 40 pounds!
The original design followed the iMac until 2003, when Apple retired the design for the "goose-neck" iMac G4 (although as Evan reminds us in the comments, the 'gumdrop' form factor lived on in the education-market model eMac). In 2004, Apple created the iconic design of the iMac G5, which is the same major design style they use for the iMac today.
On an iPhone/iPod touch? Click here to see the video.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Evan Rose said 8:58AM on 8-15-2008
You've forgotten all about the poor ill-fated eMac. I believe the eMac was a more direct descendant of the iMac, despite the different name, as it also used a CRT and had an all-in-one design.
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John from Buffalo said 8:59AM on 8-15-2008
To which, I've owned about 10 iMacs (using one right now) to celebrate each iteration and upgrade.
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Jonathan Wise said 9:21AM on 8-15-2008
Y'know, the colors seem laughable and a bit cheesy now (I saw a couple colorful Macs in the corner of the screen while watching some old Buffy/Angel episodes recently and had to laugh at how bright they looked) but I think at the time, the playfulness of the original iMac (and the colorful revisions later) were a big factor in making personal computing and the Internet something friendly and accessible.
You could argue (probably successfully) that the personal computer came a decade or so earlier, but I think its safe to say that the iMac brought things to the next level. It made the gray boxes with confusing ports (remember chaining devices on a parallel port? or dealing with scsi termination?) a joke when compared to its elegance and simplicity. Here was something you could put in the kids bedroom, in your kitchen, or in whatever space was personal to you, and it wasn't like a scary piece of technology, but a cute little friend.
I wouldn't wish for the sexy new Macs to be re-released in garishly bright colors like the original iMacs (although I would vote to bring back the sunflower iMac design!) but in looking back, I think those colorful iMacs were a pretty important step in computing...
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puhsitch said 9:31AM on 8-15-2008
And if it weren't for the iMac, we wouldn't have this today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQmK1CnwOUI
Jesse said 9:45AM on 8-15-2008
I love my C2D iMac. Great machine for daily use, although I wish they would offer more powerful graphics options for the base model. They could easily fit a 8600 in one.
I still have a pink iMac G3.
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Victor Agreda Jr said 9:46AM on 8-15-2008
Unfortunately one place you couldn't put these babies was in a standard dorm room! Most dorms have tiny little desks never intended for machines (although my pizza-box Centris 610 fit fine back in the day).
Which one was called the "space egg" design, the eMac or iMac?
Also, I miss the whole "think different" motto. Freaked out the squares, man.
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Kizorblade said 9:50AM on 8-15-2008
Haaaaaapppy birthday to you.
Haaaaaapppy birthday to you.
Happy birthday dear iMac.
Happy birthday to youuuuu.
Double figures already! You're getting all grown up before my eyes
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Filipe Alvarenga said 9:53AM on 8-15-2008
There's something wrong. Steve Jobs introduced de iMac on May 6 (1998) at the Flint Center.
http://translate.google.com.br/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmacmagazine.com.br%2Fblog%2F2008%2F05%2F06%2Fimac-completou-hoje-10-anos%2F&sl=pt&tl=en&hl=pt-BR&ie=UTF-8
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Filipe Alvarenga said 10:15AM on 8-15-2008
Ok. May 6 was the announcement of the iMac. August 15 was the first time an iMac was shipped...
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SpinThis! said 10:24AM on 8-15-2008
>The specs for the original iMac were nothing to laugh about then, but it's certainly laughable now.
Laughable? No. Outdated, maybe, but that's what happens to all tech. I would argue older technology is never laughable unless it actually flopped.
Since it was a fad, the polka dots and other colors were certainly laughable though...
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Zoidbert said 10:41AM on 8-15-2008
My mom had the Flower Power iMac; she loved it (though it was in a hutch, and you really couldn't see it, per se). She used it up until Katrina hosed it (almost literally).
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firesign3000 said 10:52AM on 8-15-2008
never had the original crt imacs here at work, but started with a couple of the 15" g4 goosenecks. still have a few of those and some g5 imacs in service. just equipped several labs with 54 24" intel imacs. they've served very well.
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Chris Coleman said 11:31AM on 8-15-2008
I miss those old iMacs. At least one of my friends had the very first one, and my sisters got the iMac DV that came out later. I bought my first Mac (that wasn't really my parents') shortly after the iMac came out, but I opted for the Power Mac G3 266 MHz tower. It was a kick-ass machine. It could actually play Quake 3 fairly well when I upgrade the vram to a whopping 6 megs.
It was quite possibly the most powerful computer in my dorm building that fall, for a while at least.
Yeah, I was pretty awesome back then. Yep. OS 8.1 FTW.
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JJ1974 said 11:42AM on 8-15-2008
Have you all forgotten your Mac history lessons (or didn't live through those days)? The very first iMac was only available in one colour - Bondi Blue (named after the beach's blue water in Sydney, Australia).
The 5 "fruity" ones came out in January 1999.
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mugczar said 12:59PM on 8-15-2008
I can't believe it's only been 10 years since the iMac came out. I was stumbling through college when the first one I ever saw showed up in the newsroom from Apple for us to 'test.'
And I can't determine if I should feel old or NOT old. It makes me feel not old, so I'm going to go with that.
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jonathan ober said 2:31PM on 8-15-2008
I used to think that the multi colored devices where kind of dumb...you know. but now seeing that apple paved the way you can now get a lot more custom looking machines right up front. Look at Dell and their colored laptops, Nintendo and the plethora of DS colors and other colored tech out there...perhaps they really did set that standard first
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jonathan ober said 2:31PM on 8-15-2008
I used to think that the multi colored devices where kind of dumb...you know. but now seeing that apple paved the way you can now get a lot more custom looking machines right up front. Look at Dell and their colored laptops, Nintendo and the plethora of DS colors and other colored tech out there...perhaps they really did set that standard first
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Derek Ledbetter said 1:02AM on 8-20-2008
Nintendo did this before Apple. The Game Boy Color, released in 1998, was available in five different colors. I don't know if there were any other computers or video games before this available in multiple colors.
timothyjaycolburn said 7:20PM on 8-15-2008
I still have my lime green G3 266 mhz iMac. It was the first Apple computer I ever bought. I maxed the memory out to 512mb and have it running Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. It runs it decently too (a little slow at times, but eh, not a big deal). Mine fell prey to the flyback transformer failure.. but I took off the back of it and hooked up a VGA monitor (using a video adaptor) and that solved the problem. I don't use it much anymore. I really only turn it on when I miss OS 9...
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tnkgrl said 8:38PM on 8-15-2008
My roommate still uses my old fan-less 600 Mhz iMac G3 (slot-load) running Tiger with 256 MB RAM, a 20 GB HD, DVD-ROM, and AirPort card :)
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