I never wanted or bought one, but the original iMac was pretty interesting in hindsight.
- The colors screamed "I use a computer but am not a computer person". Back then, culturally, being a computer person was not as accepted as it is now.
- The slightly translucent plastic allowed you to see a little bit of the innards, but not so clearly. This gave the computer case some depth and complexity that you would never otherwise get in "cheap" molded plastic.
- The iMac was underpowered even at introduction. But it showed that computers had already reached the point at which they have more processing power than needed to accomplish almost anything you needed a computer for.
- The stacking of the internal components and the location of the vents allowed the computer to be fanless yet have sufficient cooling. Convection created by the heat of the CRT generated airflow to cool the CPU.
> The iMac was underpowered even at introduction. But it showed that computers had already reached the point at which they have more processing power than needed to accomplish almost anything you needed a computer for.
...is that actually true? Because it launched with a 233MHz G3, and although my memory is hazy, I remember people specifically pointing out that on most available cross-platform benchmarks it beat whatever Pentium II was current then.
That situation didn't last, but I have specific memories of "This is a cheap home computer that's faster than Dell's highest end tower".
I had a dual-866MHz G4 (MDD) and in most things my Tualatin P3-1200 at the time absolutely beat it. But the G4 was worth using until it literally caught fire just after the warranty ended.
Motorola has a long history of making processors, such as the 68000-series. They powered Macs (and Amiga)
From Wikipedia:
> The PowerPC 7xx is a family of third generation 32-bit PowerPC microprocessors designed and manufactured by IBM and Motorola (spun off as Freescale Semiconductor bought by NXP Semiconductors)
No one saying it competed with high-end machines of the day. But it was quite powerful compared to PCs targeting a home audience.
The other thing to remember, is that computers were only barely powerful enough back then. Powerful models felt powerful precisely because we were desperate for every last CPU cycle we could get.
Barely powerful in early mid-90's. From 1996 an the multimedia PC and a bit later witht the Pentium MMX, the power gap from a 286 based DOS PC from 1991 was something else.
Also MMX was basically the first mainstream use of SIMD so adoption was glacially slow since you had not only limited compiler support but also no libraries and little programmer familiarity with the style. That took a long time for knowledge and tools to improve, especially in the nascent internet era where people couldn’t just look things up on a comprehensive reference site or get help on GitHub.
I'd say there's still limited compiler support for MMX. Because of the strange way you have to use it (it trashes the floating point registers until the next `emms`) compilers won't use it even if it's beneficial, so no autovectorization.
A lot of the performance complaints came from software that was built for the 68k and ran under emulation. As software built for PPC came out, that complaint went away.
What is funny is that macOS 9 was so snappy on the GUI side but you had to start employing RAM disks and given different names to the same application to run them simultaneously. It could really scoot but occasionally a dialog box might bring everything to a halt until hitting OK or Cancel.
The CMD640 IDE chipset used was utter trash and most of the bottleneck. It wasn't until the G4 series that apple stopped slapping it in everything. A system with the CMD640 only used for cdrom, and a bootable SCSI PCI card performed a lot better.
Actual use. You’re probably thinking of the G5/PPC970, which was on introduction more of a case of “the fastest, provided absolutely the only thing you care about is vector operations”.
It may also have changed while you owned one: the stuff which was optimized native code ran quite well but there were also plenty of rushed ports or things running under Rosetta. I don’t think it was Photoshop but I remember some of the designers I knew commenting that one app shipping a true optimized port was like getting a new computer.
Two big things that affected the cross platform experience and perception of speed at the time were the twin pillars of the late 90s web, Internet Explorer and Flash, both of which had superior optimization for Windows and x86.
The introduction of Safari is an underrated milestone in changing that, and I would suggest the Mac didn’t really match the Windows browsing experience inclusive of Flash until the introduction of Intel Macs.
As someone that bought a 603e based all in one around that time, I remember the introduction of the G3 being almost comparable to the intel->apple silicon transition.
Sometimes I wonder how different the world would look today if Apple had become large enough to justify the investment the G5 required and macs were running on those.
I suspect even if the Intel transition hadn't happened, assuming the Mac survived it probably still would have been destined for Apple Silicon once the ARM platform became powerful enough.
The G3 was a beast compared to the 603. IIRC it was about 30% faster clock for clock. By going with a G3 in the iMac seriously beefed up the capabilities of their consumer machines. The iMac was more than twice as fast as the similarly priced Performas sold the day before the iMac's introduction. It was even more powerful than even higher end Performas approaching twice the price of the iMac.
One of the more tragic examples, from the perspective of laptop buyers, was the WallStreet PowerBooks. They started at $2300 and was easily 30% faster than the high end 3400s that were $4-5k. The original G3 PowerBook (Kanga) was over $5k. It was a huge boost in power for half the price and honestly much better industrial design. The 3400 was a chonky boi.
Stock iMac had 64Mb RAM, 5400 RPM based hard disk, and a poor 2D ATI based video card. And Mac OS 8.1. I actually purchased it (I was young and naive), and the Mac version of Unreal (game) to network play against my homegrow PC (Pentium 200, with Voodoo Rush video card), and the game performance was night and day (in favour of Wintel). MacOS 8.1 was so bad, I ended up installing YellowDog Linux on it, collected dust, then eventually gave it away.
> Back then, culturally, being a computer person was not as accepted as it is now.
One cool thing about the appliance computing revolution (phones and vg consoles) is that now most people don't have computers again and "being a computer person" is a thing again.
Yeah, the "computers for non-computer persons" evolved from iMac to iPhone to iPad (plus the Android variants). But the risk is that being a "real computer person" with a real computer might become as outlandish as being a "real photographer" with a real camera has already become.
This is already the case. In 2019, I was startled to find that some incoming software engineers at my work didn't own a desktop or laptop... they just expected they'd use whatever computer their work provided.
Everything that wasn’t doable on their smartphone. They would use their work computer for personal things because they just didn’t have a “personal” computer other than a phone. Hence my startlement.
Several of them don't own computers and rely entirely on smartphones for their computing needs.
It's frankly a worrying trend. Smartphones are consumer devices that do not allow the kind of automation, tinkering, scripting, and ownership that computers do.
On the flip side it means that I will be more competitive in the job market as I grow older than I was expecting.
> The colors screamed "I use a computer but am not a computer person"
A huge part of the mac user base at that time were writers/editorial staff and graphic designers. I don't know if we lump them in the "computer person" crowd as they basically spend their day in front of a computer, but yes, to them the colors were really well received, as a salvation from the beige world they had to deal with.
The same way people covered their macbooks in stickers and skins to get away from the uniform metallic gray canvas.
The RGB features on PCs are glued on and honestly rather ridiculous.
There's a difference between glued-on extras - which are more like car customisation - and stylish integrated design.
A friend of mine used to joke about design-for-men being anything that was black and ribbed - which most PC cases are. If you add RGB to something black and ribbed, it's still black and ribbed - but now it has RGB stuck on it.
The curves, colour wraparound, and white translucent plastic of the iMac were the opposite of that. Everything was integrated into a whole - which was actually a nice metaphor for where Apple were trying to go in general.
I think at no time did we have as much choice as now for case styles. Classic and stylish wooden cases, colorful cubes, lab like half transparent white boxes, trapezoidal snow themed open cases [0], basically everything under the sun in a tower format.
Ironically, except for macs. Macs only come in solid metalic colors, at best.
The bright colours and curvy design were absolutely critical to the iMac.
PCs and older Macs were boring, and so were the people who used them and talked about them.
So what if it had 253 Megasnerds and an extra fast blibbyblop? It was boring and beige. No one cared.
The iMac was exciting and fun, and so was anyone who bought one and used one.
You could get a row of them in different colours for your design office, and they'd look stunning. Clients would walk in and literally say "Wow!"
The magic worked in any SME office that wasn't trying to look boringly corporate - which turned out to be a lot of offices.
Absolute marketing masterpiece to make the design a marketing statement - not just for Apple itself, but for any creative or service provider who bought one.
Let's not ignore the stoner college kid demographic.
You're sitting smoking up in a tiny dorm and the most dominant item almost certainly was your computer. Having it be Bondi Blue colored with beautiful curves made that experience much nicer.
> The colors screamed "I use a computer but am not a computer person". Back then, culturally, being a computer person was not as accepted as it is now.
Chic. Not geek.
The marketing claim during the introduction couldn’t have been more fitting and for everything that followed after coming out of apple.
I don't know, starting with OS X a lot of devs used Macs because 'it's a UNIX system', and for a while their hardware was relatively consumer-friendly (battery, RAM and disk were user-replacable/upgradable on my 2009 MacBook).
Paradoxically I did the opposite move at the time, I was a teenager who grew up with MacOS and knew it inside out. All my knowledge was basically voided with MacOS X, so if I had to start from scratch anyway, I might as well switch to Windows where I don't need to check the box to know if a game or hardware will be compatible.
I kind of wonder if this whole 'Macs and Unix' are some post-purchase rationalization. This makes more sense than it seems, Apple is best in class when it comes to hypnosis.
Why does being unix based matter? I imagine if you are doing server stuff you are on Linux/Unix. If you are doing C stuff, you are doing it closer to the end device. If you are doing visual stuff you are doing it on Windows since they have us by the balls.
Maybe if you are making iOS apps, but that wouldn't be until the end of the semi-replaceable era.
Maybe doing web dev? Yeah probably not, you'd be doing windows with firefox, chrome, and IE for front end.
Even in this modern era where Microsoft cannot be trusted and Linux Desktop still cannot handle NVIDIA, people are still choosing to do dev work on those system. The only time I see using Macs is for iOS dev only. (Maybe you might SSH into a server for backend stuff, but 25 year old computers can do that)
The out of the box ssh experience on Linux is far superior to windows, ssh mounting of disks, easy scp and rsync access without jumping through hoops. To me, thinking of doing my job from a windows box sounds painful.
I'd imagine these necessary tools for Linux server dev/admin are also readily available on Mac, if not installed already. Now, is that worth the price delta? Probably not, but given the sparsity of pre installed, supported Linux hardware I can potentially see the appeal.
This is why in hindsight it was a bad idea for Microsoft to never been serious about POSIX subsystem on the Windows NT linage.
That is why I even bothered with GNU/Linux to start with.
OS X adoption by UNIX crowd proved the point that for a large majority of development community, GNU/Linux itself is irrelevant, what they care about is a POSIX like experience.
Hence Microsoft learning by their Windows NT/POSIX management mistakes, and creating WSL to fill that gap.
For those of us running Virtual Box and VMWare for years, it only brings the convinience of one product less to care about.
Speaking for myself, I went to CompUSA to see what they had that I could use to build my next home Linux box. I didn’t expect to buy anything, just was window shopping.
I wanted to check the Internet price on something, and asked an employee whether any of the demo computers had connectivity. It turned out that only the Mac did.
As I started using it, I remembered that I used to be an Apple user, and it would be easier to find commercial software that worked for it, and it was actually UNIX. Terminal and everything.
So, I stopped component shopping and headed to my local Apple Store later that week. Bought a G5 tower and I’ve never looked back.
Not at all, back when I was at CERN that was exactly the reason many researchers were going for OS X, as the Solaris workstations were being decommissioned, there was a pile of them stacked at my office.
The other alternative was Windows 2000/XP, almost no one was caring for GNU/Linux other than on the servers.
I was part of the initial group having a go at Scientific Linux, and there weren't that many users of it when I left in 2004.
In fact for many years, not sure about nowadays, the IT official policy was that installing GNU/Linux, even Scientific Linux, meant the users were on their own, the only UNIX desktop that they would officially support was OS X.
People wanted all the CLI goodness of unix (linux) with a gui that functioned. Windows had cygwin, but was otherwise anemic at the CLI. I had a solaris and later a linux desktop next to my Windows desktop, but linux on laptops was a huge PITA. I got a G4 Powerbook and had the best of both worlds, able to run something like Lightroom, and have all the familiar unix tools.
I switched from Linux to macOS a decade ago, and the underlying UNIX-like system meant that I could continue to use all the same development and shell tools I've used my whole career, and most of the time I don't even notice I'm on macOS.
I also prototype natively and locally even though I eventually deploy to Linux. Lower level C code (with the odd #ifdef), and compilers and tooling for more niche languages all work perfectly fine.
The latter is a bigger point than it may seem. There is still a lot of open source software that is not working well as it should on Windows, particularly compilers and libraries.
If you were a kid or wanted to get involved with web development or other stuff you had a supported consumer platform, with consumer software and this hidden mode that gave you access to all of the Unix toolset.
That’s not it. The first place I saw large Mac adoption was all the long time Linux and Unix nerds in my CS dept. Suddenly there were heaps of G4 MacBooks all over CS. I got one based off the recommendation of a friend who was a FreeBSD user.
It was definitely a huge selling point for anyone doing web development. Suddenly you had a consumer machine that was close to what was running in production.
You have to remember - there was no docker back in the day, no WSL, and linux laptops were for a tiny niche group of hard core people.
It definitely was not post hoc rationalization. Anyone doing Unix or open source development - not as dominant then but still big - had been faced with paying huge sums for a proprietary box with increasingly uncompetitive hardware or dealing with desktop Linux’s driver and stability challenges (I did that for years).
When OS X came out, you could buy basically for the first time a good, lightweight but powerful laptop which would run most of your favorite Unix code as well as Office, Photoshop, etc. and had 5-6 hours of battery life because you didn’t have to disable power saving to avoid kernel panics. That wasn’t perfect, of course, but a ton of early web stalwarts like Perl, PHP, MySQL ran better than on Windows with decent fidelity for anyone deploying on Linux or Solaris.
I bought Apple stock starting around 2001 when I noticed that in addition to traditional markets like design, I was going to hackathons or conferences like USENIX and seeing half the attendees with titanium PowerBooks. It’s hard to imagine now but at the time that was pretty speculative since their finances were still lean in the pre-iPod era (if I’d been willing to make a bigger gamble I’d probably be writing this from a yacht).
It was depressing reading Horace Dediu’s analysis of Apple’s accounting practices in the year or two after the iPhone’s release, knowing that Apple stock was significantly undervalued, and not having the means to take advantage of it.
I put in one market order on 9/10. It wasn’t processed until after the market reopened but went in at like $17/share. I remember thinking I should buy more but 9/11 and the dotcom crater made me decide to save my cash.
Oh man, so much this. I made a college roommate so much money by telling him to put all the money his parents gave him in Apple stock after the iPhone was released. He didn’t agree (he was also a massive anti-Apple pro PC guy…he owned a Zune) until I explained Apple’s subscription accounting and what it actually meant.
I still don’t understand why investors didn’t understand Apple’s subscription accounting and how it meant that their quarterly iPhone profits were something like 1/16th their actual iPhone profits.
I don’t think “macs are unix” applied to iMacs since they didn’t run osx for the years where they mattered.
But I really only use Macs because it’s the easiest unix machine for me to use. I don’t know of another laptop where everything works and I also natively have a shell and unix. I know there are ways to get close to this but they are all one more step and I don’t care enough to bother.
If there was a Linux laptop with a decent desktop and packaging manager I never had to think about that cost the same as mac, I would switch in an instant.
With Apple, you get the marriage of great hardware with (what I consider) an okay operating system. I VASTLY prefer Linux and use it daily. Since it's Arch, and since I'm currently using Hyprland as my desktop, I sincerely doubt that would meet your criteria. Battery life is nowhere near what a current Apple product can achieve.
I know Ubuntu has been trying for years to achieve this but, we're a long way off.
Boy do I miss this era of computing. From the advertisements to the competition to the innovation that was happening at the time. It all felt so exciting.
There are a ton of dev tools that are Linux/Mac only.
MS didn’t rewrite Windows internals to support WSL for the love of open source. They did it because most dev work happens on Linux (and now macs). Macs get to use that for free. Microsoft had to do work itself to support NodeJS and Docker, for example, and they became available on Windows many years after they were available on Linux/MacOS.
Docker, especially, was a piece of software that for many years was almost necessary for dev teams. And for many years you couldn’t use it if you were on Windows.
Mac was a lot less painful for installing open source software than Windows was at the time (and still is in some ways). A compatible tool chain makes porting Linux software much easier. Installing is also easier when you’ve got Bash and a file system that resembles Linux.
And having a Unix shell out of the box was/is easier than dealing with Cygwin and its alternatives.
Windows is better these days because the cloud dragged Microsoft into doing something about its shell experience. But even now Windows versions of things like Curl are half-assed versions.
Yes, but GGP specifically mentioned "everything that followed after coming out of apple [sic]", which I took to mean "all following machines up to the current day."
The primary reason macs are popular for development is that they’re Unix based.
Even Docker, for example, runs natively on Linux and Macs and doesn’t on Windows (or didn’t initially at least…heck it wasn’t even available on Windows for many years until MS itself worked with Docker to bring it to Windows).
NodeJS took 2 years to come to Windows, again with MS having to work with Joyent yo achieve this, but was available on Linux and Mac from the outset.
> Even Docker, for example, runs natively on Linux and Macs
It runs natively on Linux. On Macs it starts a Linux VM and then does containers inside that, which adds overhead (and seems to preallocate a lot of ram).
Other than that yes, you can have a working GUI and a unixy enough command line on the same machine. And that's why I switched to macs... from linux.
It's still not accepted, by the way. If you meet someone and they don't start looking around the room for an escape route when they find out you are a "computer person" then they are probably a computer person too.
The money part of tech is accepted. If you have enough of that, people will at least be courteous to your face, even if you're the stereotypical computer person.
The iMac was not particularly underpowered. Could it have used more RAM or hard drive? Sure.
But the CPU, as others here have said, was pretty solid. It could run top of the line games at the time like Quake 3.
And one thing I don’t read much about for these original iMacs is how nice the screen was. It was a CRT, but it had a nice anti-glare coating and could have the resolution increased to 1024x768 which wasn’t typical for a 15” screen at the time.
So the feature set was very nice… ignoring the hockey puck mouse!
It was underpowered for its price compared to windows machines.
The fact that it could run Quake3 is kind of the point as it didn’t need “all that power.”
The complaint I had was that for the price I could get a more powerful wintel box.
Comically this is no longer true with mac laptops and it’s kind of weird to see it flipped where MacBooks have powerful processors and decent levels of ram (although sticking with 8gb in the air seems like they are just sticking to the principle that you don’t need lots of ram rather than saving the $9 for 16 or 32).
Is that true though? Could you get a Wintel machine with better hardware including the little things like USB, FireWire and Ethernet and even WiFi? 15 inch screen capable of 1024x768?
Wifi was kind of useless until 802.11b was agreed. I used one of the early Cisco(?) wireless adaptors circa 1997 and 1998 and…it was mostly unpleasant except for the fact that it was wireless (I don't know if it was 802.11 or a predecessor protocol).
I would like a Unix-based laptop. So I won’t consider a windows or chromeos laptop, but would a Linux.
It’s not so much how bad the windows os (I have to admin my kids gaming pc) but it’s inability to run many dev packages that are first or only on Unix. It’s possible to run WSL or Cygwin or other Unix interfaces and get stuff working. But it’s extra steps and I want to simplify.
As mentioned elsewhere, you couldn't get WiFi on basically anything, since 802.11b wasn't really available yet. I would strongly argue Apple was the leading force in popularizing wireless internet on laptops and desktops, and they didn't have it on the iMac because their AirPort 802.11b product wouldn't be available to anyone for another year.
Instead, it came out the following year with the introduction of the iBook. [1]
FireWire did not exist on the iMac right away though... but it also was not at all common on Wintel machines at the time.
10/100 Base-T Ethernet, something standard on even the original iMac [2], was also not commonplace on Wintel machines. Packing a 56k modem in from the start was also a nice move on Apple's part to ensure you had the chance to get the fastest internet possible over a standard landline, which is how the majority of internet users accessed the internet at the time.
The only time I saw Firewire on a PC it was on a Sony VAIO, which makes sense as their cameras had it. Even then I think the same machine had ethernet from a PCMCIA card with a dongle... later we had some Xircom (spelling?) PCMCIA cards that could take up two slots and deliver a full size ethernet jack without a dongle.
> although sticking with 8gb in the air seems like they are just sticking to the principle that you don’t need lots of ram
I think it's part of the product line differentiation. I do all my development on a macbook air (well, some of the compilation is done on a remote machine, fr code that will run there). It's great: conveniently very light and with plenty of power.
Sure, some people need a ton of VMs, but I don't. But Apple points out that if you're a "professional" you ought to be using a "Pro" machine and the RAM is one way they do it.
They aren't really. There are faster Intel and Ryzen CPUs for far less than what Apple asks for an M2 Max. You can get an Asus Vivobook S with an Intel i9 13900H, 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, HiDPI 15" OLED screen for $1100, the same price as a 13" M2 MBA with 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. The i9 13900H will outperform the M2 Max too. Really the only place the Mac wins is efficiency and against Intel rivals GPU performance. And if you don't care as much about having as nice a screen you can usually find something with a better discrete GPU at the same price.
> You can get an Asus Vivobook S with an Intel i9 13900H, 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, HiDPI 15" OLED screen for $1100
Yes, but then you’re stuck with an Asus. Having been there before, that’s a hard pass. The real comparison for Macbooks are higher end models like Thinkpads.
And there are very few laptops that can compete on metrics like fan noise and ability to run at full performance unplugged without nuking the battery.
It might sound silly but this a big thing for me. It’s disconcerting for a laptop to sound like an angry banshee when I’m pushing it, and my 16” M1 Max MBP doesn’t. It’s also why I sold the gaming laptop and replaced it with a desktop, because quiet high performance x86 laptops are apparently hard to come by.
It really depends on the workload. I was working Sysops for a Mac-based shop during the Apple Silicon announcement, and we had a lot of broken Docker containers on ARM. When I left, your options as a Mac dev was:
- Use Apple Silicon, run Docker in QEMU and enjoy idle temps of 70-80c when building for production
OR
- Use an old Intel Mac, use "native" Docker and get slightly shorter build times and a marginally cooler system
Looking back on it, the only engineers there with quiet laptops were the ones using Linux on x86 hardware. It was simply what we deployed to, as an SaaS business.
That’s just the natural outcome of needing to emulate anything. x86 machines running any OS have similar issues emulating other architectures — see how much muscle it takes to competently emulate the now-ancient Wii U for example. It just so happens that emulation of other platforms on x86 isn’t necessary all that frequently. There’s other issues with Docker on macOS, but those can be worked around (see OrbStack for some such improvements).
This should become less of a problem as it becomes more normal to maintain dual-architecture Docker setups. There’s also the possibility that “shipping the jungle” will fall back out of favor, which would fix various other papercuts that result from Docker’s tight coupling with Linux.
If I don’t care about a laptop with a better screen, battery life, not running so hot that it ensures that there will never be in little Scarfaces if I put in on my lap and it sounding like a 747 when I open three Chrome tabs…an x86 laptop is fine?
If you are going to compare crap from Asus with something Apple makes, as if they're even remotely comparable, then we can just stop right there.
That's the problem with whipping out the spec sheet: low-end commodity machines will always have a better price than anything Apple makes. Never mind that it sounds like a 737 if you dare open more than one browser tab, and your eyes will prematurely go bad from the fuzzy screen, hey, you didn't pay the "Apple tax"!
It has a 120Hz 2880x1620 15" OLED screen. That's 220 PPI. If that's "fuzzy" then the $200 more expensive 15" MacBook Air is "fuzzy" too with worse blacks and no per-pixel backlight and only 60Hz refresh rate. Unless 4 PPI is the difference between fuzzy and not fuzzy.
I was still using the keyboard from an iMac G3 up until 2019. It felt fun to type on, and had a passthrough USB which was very convenient for low-power devices.
The built-in hub was one of the best features of Apple boards for a long, long time. It started with ADB ports on on late 80s/early 90s boards and extends all the way into the 2010s when the wired aluminum board finally dropped the USB ports its predecessors carried.
It’s such an obvious little quality of life improvement, and yet the only other board I’ve come across with the feature is the HHKB Pro 2 (Pro 3 drops the hub) and some variants of Das Keyboards.
I started with an apple keyboard. I bought a Das in the early 2010s. When the das quickly ran into issues, I got an HHKB pro 2, which I’ve taken in my bag every day to every job I’ve had and I use at home[0]. Your comment just made me realize that USB hubs aren’t on every keyboard!
[0] the swappable USB cable is so handy! Just leave one plugged into each machine.
This was a problem on most Macs of the era. The ATi Rage chips used in most Macs of the time was not powerful enough for Quake III. They were ok for less intense games but Q3 was pushing the envelope.
The mouse was the first laser mouse I ever used and I believe it connected with USB, which was novel at the time. It was probably the most impressive thing about the iMac for me personally.
I remember the hockey puck mouse had a ball because it was a pretty fantastic ball: it was dual toned, one hemisphere white, the other Bondi blue. As you rolled the mouse, you'd see the ball turn and have a neat color display through the translucent plastic of the hockey puck mouse.
That was my favorite part of the hockey puck mouse - it was one of those little moments of "surprise and delight" from Apple. And alas, I can't find a good video of it online.
> 1024x768 which wasn’t typical for a 15” screen at the time.
I double-take at statements like this. I forget how much variation in experience there was. But, being in the SF Bay Area, we were able to read Computer Shopper etc. and carpool to the South Bay to get whatever we wanted. I recall trips to will-call doors at warehouses, as well as private sellers in small apartments. I guess I was spoiled for choice.
I distinctly remember having a 15" monitor that did 1024x768 around 1992, and working out the X modelines to use it with Slackware by 1994. I went higher from there as I got my hands on bigger 17" or 21" monitors. I'm pretty sure my 21" Nanao was usually running at 1600x1200 a couple years later. I always felt that image quality and keyboards were worth investing in, since I would spend so much time exposed to them.
As far as I recall, we often had to trade off lower color depth for higher resolutions, since framebuffer VRAM was usually limited. A lot of time was spent in 8-bit psuedo color palette modes with XFree86 before eventually using 15/16 bit "true color" modes. I don't think 24-bit made much sense until later with 3D accelerators that had more VRAM.
Oh it was definitely possible to find monitors like that, but my experience of using Macs in my school's computer lab and having a Performa at home, 800x600 was a big deal, and 640x480 was still the standard well into the 90s.
And wow, "true color" modes - now I remember having to make that choice, too! 8-bit with higher res, or 16-bit (I think it was described as "thousands of colors" at the time... and it looks like there was some scandal around the phrase "millions of colors" that Apple used: https://lowendmac.com/2018/millions-of-colors-vs-thousands-w...
The screen was OK but a premium monitor at the time would have been an aperture grille Trinitron (or similar implementation).
The iMac had a fairly dim shadow mask display that shipped with most budget computers of the era. They were also one of the more common components to prematurely fail in iMacs.
I’ve always been a computer person and I loved mines, especially the graphite one. One of the best looking machines ever.
The G3 was one heck of a CPU.
The only thing these machines suffered from was USB 1.1. ZIP drives, CD burners and scanners were all much faster in their SCSI versions. You could see USB was clearly the future, but not an immediate one.
I think the shock to the industry was that the outside, not the inside, is what made this computer successful.
People forget how it launched a complete craze of transparent plastics. Vacuums, kitchen appliances, disk drives[1], printers... EVERYTHING became colorful and transparent.
Uh, in my country that was exactly the reverse. Macs were for creation people: journalists, writers, audio and video producers, press people, cinema, poster designs, comic books... everything multimedia related.
If you knew what CMYK/RGB does mean, you'd probably be using a Mac at work.
That was the traditional Mac audience through the 80s and 90s. The point is that the iMac was an attempt to reach beyond that, to home users who just wanted to browse the internet and stuff.
Yes, at the time it was all about desktop publishing and graphic design. It wasn't until the end of the 90s that PCs started to make its way into that niche.
Also it didn't feel like Apple was for consumers until the iPod came out.
PCs were already in that niche pretty much all over the world since Windows 95 got introduced, until the Apple recovery they were mostly an US focused company, they weren't going bankrupt for nothing.
In Portugal, nowadays there are Apple Stores all over the big cities, although people still mostly buy them on credit and cable TV deals, back in those days there was a single vendor, Interlog in Lisbon, that would sell for the whole country.
Buying Apple gear meant either traveling to Lisbon, having them coming to the company if big enough or a renowed university, or buying by catalog in the listings from computer magazines.
This. When I was a kid in the 90s, I was told that "there's also Apple, they make Macintosh computers, those are very expensive but very good with colors and fonts". The only time I saw that first-gen iMac, and classic Mac OS when it was still current, was at some kind of computer exhibition. My next contact with Mac OS was in the late 00s when I discovered Hackintosh and the fact that my desktop at the time can run it.
I think that was when Jobs was deciding to bifurcate Apple's product line into the Pro and Consumer. Obviously the iMac was Consumer ... Apple would still cater to the Pro market, the creatives, but the iMac was not that machine.
One amission that I always see from this period of Apple is the impact of Gil Amelio's decisions and how much gets attributed to Jobs. This is not to undermine Jobs, he was absolutely the right person in the right place and figured out how to really sway project into shape and communicate the changes the company was making.
Projects like the iMac were already underway before jobs returned under the wings of Amelio. In the same way the whole focus on education and the simplification to 4 computer types was later attributed to Jobs once Gil was out.
That said, there was 10 month between Gil being ousted and the iMac being revieled so there was plenty of time for Jobs to put the finishing touches on that one could argue was what a lot of Apple products really needed at that time. But I suspect under Gil it would have been called something stupid like 'Machintosh for internet - 7400E'.
But Jobs was the one who partnered with Ive on the design of the iMac. If the iMac had launched with a similar design to the Power Macs it would have been ignored by the media and consumers.
But true that many of the operational changes of the company mostly came from Gil. But also Bertrand Serlet, Avie Tevanian etc deserve a lot of credit for shaking up the software and hardware teams.
The 1998 ‘Power Macintosh G3 All In One’ is an interesting stepping stone to the iMac. Beige, blockier than the iMac, but noticeably curvier than preceding Power Macs. A return to the single unit design, and the first use of translucent plastic.
I believe the first use of translucent plastic by Apple was the Newton eMate 300, designed by Jonathan Ive and released in early 1997 when Gil Amelio was still CEO:
The photo in the Wikipedia article isn't very good. The actual color of the translucent plastic is a brighter teal, fairly close to the "Bondi Blue" of the iMac that followed.
If you wanna dig real deep, the first use would have been on the Power Macintosh 9600. It's subtle -- you can just about see it in the Wikipedia photo -- but it has a translucent blue plastic latch button on the top of the machine that I believe is the same shade as the eMate. It was introduced about a month earlier.
Also reminded me that Apple actually sold a dual 604e / 200 MHz system in the OS 8 era. I'm guessing the only software that could have made use of the second processor would have been some specially optimized routines in Photoshop or similar.
Similarly, Apple was experimenting with new metal casting techniques and used them to create the Sim Removal Tool included with every iPhone. The theory at the time was they were going to use this new cast in upcoming iPhones. But ended up going with milled stainless steel instead.
There was a huge push around that time for Apple to make a thin client style thing. Sun was doing it with java stations and it seemed to be “the buzz” and obvious direction. I don’t think anyone expected a consumer push in response.
Could you elaborate? NeXT machines were quite the opposite of thin clients. They were very expensive and had a lot of memory etc. for computers of the early 90ies.
NeXT hardware was also massively underpowered, running on 680x0 in the early 90’s when other workstation vendors had moved on to RISC (Sun Sparc, etc.) Sun was actually the Unix leader in the thin client space. All their systems could network boot, mount home directories off NFS, share a common user directory (NIS), etc.
NeXT didn't have thin clients because the concept never took off anywhere other than a few niche banking applications.
But it had many of the core pillars e.g. remote home directories, remote/RPC applications. NeXT in particular with frameworks like EOF/PDO pushed for more network centric desktop applications.
It doesn't sound like much today but were pretty new concepts for GUI users.
The reason I mentioned it was that there was talk that the iMac was going to be potentially the first consumer-grade thin client.
Yes, but the thin clients used the same concepts that they pioneered with SunOS / Solaris, like X11. Sun's "thin clients" were mostly just X terminals.
But the Sun (and NeXT) workstations were not just mostly X terminals, that’s the point I’m trying to make. They were workstations, pretty much the opposite of a thin client.
Ok. I view "thin" as shades of gray: example a diskless, net-booting Sun is "thinner" than a full blown workstation. Those foundational technologies (like NFS, NIS, X...) made it easier for Sun to build and promote full blown thin clients later on.
To my knowledge, NeXT never supported a diskless config. (Or did they?? Did anyone work with that?)
I understand that couldn't be purchased without a disk but I kind of remembering booting cubes and slabs from a network file. This was probably 5 years after dropping hardware.
I get what you're saying — I'm just remembering Jobs demoing how his NeXT user account was remote and any NeXT machine he sat down on and logged into suddenly became "his" computer.
That's the "thin" client I'm thinking of. But maybe that's just "client".
In retrospect, it's quite funny in light of how webapps and Cloud evolved. As Spolsky predicted in 1998:
"between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can’t think of a single useful thing to build for us"
Man, I normally have some respect for Spolsky's writing, but this one is overly-dismissive crap. Sure, Microsoft really needed to reel in the 13 versions of OneDrive they kept releasing and rereleasing, but that's the only part of the article that aged even remotely well.
"And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn’t stop him."
Go ahead, try and take away that feature now, see if any customers complain.
I one time saw a talk where they discussed the issue of having to make sure the mouse was in the same location on logout and login for his home slab and later dell laptop.
NeXT rendering engine was display postscript and they had a common set-up of rendering the DPS on a remote computer while logged in over a network.
The overall set-up meant that all the data was at headquarters and users could login in from any location and have a local DPS rendering of the centralized user account.
The iMac is the first New World ROM. That’s most assuredly the project that was underway at Apple under Amelio. It was vital to allow a Mac to use USB for all its interactions. But it means nothing if the marketing of the device wasn’t good. For that, I’m inclined to believe Jobs and Ive are responsible for how they made the device.
Yes, the iMac was ready but Jobs set Ives loose on the iMac. The 9600 and the 8500 printer were both beige boxes but they had greenish translucent plastic bits were humans would touch. This was during the spindler/amelio/Jobs era but pre-dates the iMac.
>the simplification to 4 computer types was later attributed to Jobs once Gil was out.
Amelio simplified the product categories down to four. They were still full of garbage--Jobs made the real difference there. He got rid of all the trash peripherals and replaced the (many) computer lines with only the iMac.
Yeah the GP sounds like it's apologizing a bit much for Amelio. The quadrant-based product lines was not really in place until the release of the iBook in 1999.
Amelio failed to cut the printer/accessory divisions which were mostly just selling rebadged hardware from other companies. He kept the Newton division even though it was not on a trajectory to success (I say this as a long time Newton fan). He also kept around far more Mac SKUs than were necessary (Performas, education-only SKUs). That's all stuff Jobs cut when he came back.
Amelio had the unenviable task of righting a sinking ship. He didn't necessarily do a bad job at it but acqui-merging with Next and getting Jobs back was the best choice he made during his tenure.
That is very fair. It felt like Gil had some good ideas, had a reasonably good feel for what needed to be done, just didn't have the intuition to execute it well. Jobs did.
In a way Gil probably would have done very well working under Jobs but once you are in the CEO seat, there is no chance of taking that demotion.
I remember seeing an iMac in a Cher video around '98 or '99. There weren't that many computers on TV in those days and this was the first time I'd see one in a music video.
I thought it looked like a bubblegum toy computer for kids so I didn't want one. I was a kid myself, but hey, all the computers I was familiar with were serious beige boxes and this didn't seem "professional" enough. But I was intrigued.
I'm also intrigued about the "Princess Bride" analogy in the article, I'm still processing that. Is SJ being compared to Cary Elwes or am I missing the joke?
> he rapidly ran down a list of the company’s assets and liabilities. Apple didn’t have a wheelbarrow or a holocaust cloak, but it did have a young industrial designer who had been experimenting with colors and translucent plastic
There's a scene where the Man in Black is barely alive / awake after taking The Miracle Pill, while Fezzik and Inigo are telling him he has to help them stop the wedding and rescue the princess. He says "and our assets?" As little as they have, it just happens to be exactly what they need to give them an advantage.
I suppose if Steve Jobs came in and asked someone at Apple to list their assets, then yes, he's being compared to the Man in Black, as he's asked to save the day!
> With Jobs’ brains, Jony Ive’s designs, and the new PowerPC G3 chip supplied by Motorola, the company began to form a plan.
It’s also a timeless design. The 2008 unibody MacBooks look like they could have been made brand new yesterday, with the only giveaways being the I/O and the bezels on the display.
It’s safe to say that the design will almost certainly (reasonably) never get old.
You could sell the Power Mac G5 from 2003 today and it would still look pretty sleek and modern. Yes, it has an optical drive and Firewire ports, but on the whole...
My mate's family had one, and I thought it was really cool as a kid.
Then I started using it and wondered what people actually used it for, it seemed to do nothing I was used to doing on other computers.
And even though now it's obvious why you'd buy a Mac, that's been my relationship with them ever since! Hardware envy, but I like Linux too much to leave it behind.
At the time they were marketed (if I recall correctly?) mainly for browsing the internet; my first experience with a Mac was an iMac at the local library, getting 20 or 30 minutes of internet, and sitting there with my dad thinking "...now what?". I think we went to the Lego website and things like that.
I came from the other direction - used windows, admired Linux but neither was the sweet spot. OSX's brilliant UI combined with the power of a Unix-like system underneath was a perfect combo.
I have a similar beginning story, especially with the wondering what people actually used it for. "Where's the terminal?"
My story diverged from yours when one of my Mac using friends said "Apple is releasing a Unix based OS." I thought "oh please make it Unix with an awesome GUI." I was so tired of working on my GUI in linux instead of working with it. I just wanted Wi-Fi to work, I wanted wake from sleep to work consistently, I didn't want my graphics drivers to break or be so much different to configure on a different device. I wanted a consistent trackpad experience. And Apple delivered. Some of my happiest feelings of my first Mac, the 12" mbp, were about how little I used it because I was able to open it, quickly do what I wanted, and then close it. I had been using Linux as my daily driver, but switched to OS X 10.2.6, and have been there ever since. Between then and now I've used a fair variety of unixes for work, like aix, hpux, solaris, FreeBSD, and linux, and I've never been without at least a few Linux boxes at my house, but I find that the macOS GUI does the best job of getting out of the way so I can get to work.
Every once in a while I try out a Linux GUI, hoping that I'll be compelled to give it a shot as my primary work environment. I have an old Thinkpad that I keep loaded with some desktop flavor, but I always run into things that steer me back to macOS.
I was on Win95 on laptops in the 90s, and that was a complete dumpster fire. Sleep never worked, long boot times, etc. But at the time, I was mostly producing documents and presentations, and Office was file-format-consistent across both platforms. I saw how a colleague's Powerbook worked, and bought my own. It was a HUGE improvement even though it was pre-OSX.
Then the firm tanked, and I went back to coding (LAMP stuff) at about the same time OSX was released. I upgraded and never looked back.
Having a machine where zsh is a click away and on which I can ALSO run Excel is wonderful.
The iMac and the return of Jobs really felt like a fresh new start for Apple at the time.
However, after a while the design language was picked up by other brands ... and you could see translucent and coloured plastic on pretty much all types of products for a while: from PCs to home electronics to toilet paper holders, and by then it started to feel a little tacky.
> I can type on a 25-year-old iMac USB keyboard attached to a 2023 Mac Mini with no adapters! What stunning longevity.
The keyboard is fine though laptop-sized with cramped arrow keys, but the original revision iMac puck mouse is a famous case of form over function. It's not actually as bad as its reputation suggests, but Apple still silently admitted to the flawed design by adding a little centered dimple to the butan on the later five-colors version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_puck_mouse
“There's no reason that the Macintosh won't be an absolutely perfect gaming platform for anything that you wanna do. […] The only thing that you wanna do with a Mac as a serious gamer — you wanna pull out the silly one-button mouse and plug in a three-button mouse pretty quick, but aside from that…” — John Carmack, 1999 https://youtu.be/XzbFgzgy1mc?t=4791
I was a small child when the iMac and its hockey puck mouse came out. I remember being a small kid and thinking the hockey puck mouse was actually pretty great, it was way easier for my small hands to handle and the single button made things easier to click on for the educational software I was using at school compared to the Packard Bell or HP or Dell mice I would use at home or at friend's houses.
I'm actually looking for a similar kind of mouse for my small child today. He can't quite palm a mouse very well, and he often gets mixed up with right click and scroll and scroll click. When I get him focused on the right mouse button he can play some basic mouse-based games but he'll often end up getting distracted by the mouse wheel or right click which can sometimes drop him out of the games he's wanting to play.
Don't get me wrong the hockey puck mouse was probably atrocious for adult hands but as a little kid it was actually pretty nice.
Get an iMac mouse off eBay then. They’re usb and still work fine with any computer.
Edit: but there is one concern - they are not optical mice and use a ball. So if they’re really young you might want something more like an apple pro mouse
1) They're all old and are of questionable state second hand.
2) They're all ball mice, as you mentioned there's issues with those over an optical mouse
3) They almost always have ridiculously short cables. They're designed to be used with the Apple USB keyboards which had the extra USB port on the side of the keyboard that they would plug into.
Sure, some of these problems could just be overlooked or solved with accessories but in the end I'd rather just have something new which I know will work well and won't require me to get a USB extension cable or whatever. I'd really like something in a similar enough form factor but wireless and optical.
You can buy a travel/laptop mouse and those can get pretty tiny, but they still have 2 buttons and a scroll wheel.
I find using a single button mouse an interesting exercise - both windows and MacOS are usable without it, MacOS in particular you can still do ctrl+left click to get a right click. It sounds silly but when I use a mouse my left hand is still usually on the keyboard so it's not really a big deal.
I haven't done it in years, but I didn't really feel like I missed having 2 buttons and a scroll wheel when I used a 'pro mouse' lol.
Now, I could rant for a while about how awful the ergonomics of the magic mouse are!
One funny thing about that mouse quote from John Carmack is that he was a proponent of a certain level of minimalism in his games - Quake doesn't have a "use" key, you toggle switches by shooting them or pushing them with your face
Was it that successful? I don't recall having seen many of those in the wild. I mean not more than the beige mac they replaced. Same households, same businesses.
The white ibook G4 was really the one I saw starting making dent at the pc market, especially with students.
It was hugely successful. They sold millions at at time when a highly successful computer model would sell a few hundred thousand boxes.
It’s absolutely accurate to say the iMac is the product that launched the modern era of Apple. Had it been a flop the company likely would have gone under.
Do you have a number of units solds for the first gen imac G3 compared to say, the combined sales of all the Macintosh PowerMacintosh/Performa models of the generation before and the global growth of regular PC at the time?
My perception, and I emphasize in the word perception, because I lack numbers, is that the early imac and ibook were quite ridiculized for their appearance and the imac/ibook/probook series started being fashionable and successful items the generation after those: white ibook, flat LCD panel imac G4, titanium powerbooks...Those were the ones you would see elsewhere compared to the aquarium looking imac g3 and the clamshell "toilet seat" ibook that nobody wanted to be seen with. Hence me looking for numbers instead of praising news article written with rose tinted glasses and without sales numbers.
And I mean by that it may have saved apple temporarily by at least reversing/flattening the curb while not being a mega success. Macs were losing market share every year, just not losing more market share or gaining a little bit can be considered a success even without making a huge dent in the PC market.
I saw a chart that was showing the revenues and they didn't really grow from 1998 to 2000. The real increase started between 2001 - 2005 which correspond to the second gen imac and more importantly the ipod.
Having said that the apple share stopped declining after the first imace release so it may not have generated a lot of money but at least gave confidence in the market.
When I was in high school my art department planned to throw away an original iMac blue, knowing the culutral significance of this machine I told them I'll take it but because it was public property (that was planned to be thrown out but anyway) I had to sneak in the end of the day and pick it up. I took it on my hands for 90 minutes on the way home (don't let the handle fool you this thing is heavy!) but I love it and my friends are always in awe I've got one
When I was in high school I noticed my library was replacing their vt terminals with pc's. I asked if I could buy a terminal and they said just stop by when we close and we will give you one. I was expecting one of the beat up ones used for public card catalog lookup but they gave me the deluxe setup they used behind the desk a vt420 with a dot matrix printer and a wand type barcode scanner. What a score.
I wired it up in my little brothers(10) room. He would play nethack and make elaborate barcode based auth systems with it. A lot of fun. I still have strange dreams of running an entire office off terminals to this day. Strangely nobody has taken me up on it yet.
But the real lesson is do your part and help a poor high school kid.
We had the colorful ones at my first onsite dev job (a design agency) and they were constantly crashing, so my experience was 100% negative. Honestly surprised about people having good memories. OS X was pretty nice when it launched, that would have been the time where I had pinpointed some saving.
We used an iMac G3 for years to run a live production lighting and sound system (as late as 2006) and it was very reliable, I can't remember it crashing once.
I used them for years in school and everyone hated them. Not sure if it was the software or hardware. Same issue with my friends pre-iMac Mac. We could barely get through a game without beach ball spinning forever or crashing.
Yeah the original article is a bit of rose tinted glasses.
The iMacs were pretty and started a lot of HW innovation but the actual experience of using them was not great. OS 8/OS 9 were still bad operating systems, and the first few releases of OS X were not very stable either.
Similar experience at my school. Almost every computer was a PC, but we had a room with 10-15 blue G3 and sometimes we had to use them to "research" for school projects. I didn't hated them, but we avoided them because they were noticeably slower than the PCs we had. I also remember the mouse being a bit weird.
They looked nice, but didn't work as well for us as the boring beige towers.
The experience could depend on the software people were running.
Mac OS 8 and 9 didn’t even have memory protection. A program with faulty memory management, which wasn’t uncommon since it was before the creation of the wonderful and magnificent Rust, could very well destroy the runtime memory of other programs and even the kernel…
I used a Bondi Blue one to build ISP onboarding CDs, and the puck mouse was hideously bad. Nevertheless, the machines were quite popular, although I waited for the iBook to seriously get into OSX.
Apple had their hands on education for sure, as most buildings had at least one room with rows and rows of the blue iMacs. The library and others had publicly available iMacs.
I had a job doing inventory for the schools accounting department (not to be confused with Accounting, the education department) - I tagged a lot of computers. In competition with departments getting iMac’s were ones getting cheap, unpowered Dell desktops.
Not only saved Apple but, in a nutshell, was the summary of what Apple would be going forward: ultra user-friendly design, chic advertising, and sufficient functionality for all basic to intermediate users.
It is wild how the translucent plastic thing took over. From other companies trying to make imac look alikes to totally different products. I used to have an ad of irons that came in a variety of colors arranged in a circle like the imac ad.
I still have my GameBoy Color with the translucent purple case. Amazed me as a child that I could see inside the thing. I don't know the dates that well as I was a child but I assume the iMac influenced Nintendo.
I love that style; takes me back to my youth. I still have a translucent blue extension lead from that era, and it's currently used for my home A/V. That marks over 20 years of service.
> The iMac gets remembered for a lot of things, and rightly so, but it doesn’t get enough credit for essentially kick-starting the USB revolution
That's not true. USB ports were already standard before the iMac release. A quick check of old PC World magazines from Dec-97 for example shows it. The iMac was released in Aug-98.
Apple innovated a lot, but frequently get credit for many that didn't come from them.
"Kick-starting the USB revolution" doesn't mean the same thing as "innovation."
They only included USB on the original iMac, which was a death-knell for the legacy connectors, and quite controversial at the time given the iMac's place in the cultural zeitgeist.
I pretty much see adoption of technology as innovation. Not technical innovation for sure, but innovation in the sense of significant improvement over other solutions.
Don't you consider the original Mac adoption of the 3.5" floppy drive as innovation?
>USB ports were already standard before the iMac release. A quick check of old PC World magazines from Dec-97 for example shows it. The iMac was released in Aug-98.
Yes. USB ports certainly existed on PCs prior to the iMac's release in August 1998 and announcement in May 1998. They were, however, largely unused because of a lack of mass-market USB peripherals. Keyboards and mice used PS/2 ports. Printers (and ZIP drives!) used parallel ports. More expensive peripherals (storage and scanners) used SCSI. A handful of other devices used RS-232 serial. Go back to those old PC World magazines and look for the mass-market USB peripherals available for sale and let me know what you find.
Starting with the iMac-inspired Cambrian explosion in USB peripherals and for a rather lengthy period of time measured in years afterwards, it was actually rather difficult to find USB peripherals that were not made out of translucent plastic to match iMacs.
Apple wasn't the first to market with USB (and Snell didn't claim it was), but Apple most certainly drove its mass-market adoption.
USB ports not only existed, but were standard in new PCs.
A quick search shows peripherals and monitors with USB hubs in PC World May-1998 (4/5 months before iMac launch). From that months number (Pages 172-184):
"UNTIL RECENTLY , USB hardware was as scarce as hen's teeth . Now, after almost two years of foot-dragging, hardware companies are fina ll y delivering peripherals. We tested 18 of these new products"
Among the products there are keyboards, mouses, joysticks, cameras, scanners, speakers... you name it.
>Apple wasn't the first to market with USB (and Snell didn't claim it was), but Apple most certainly drove its mass-market adoption.
Sure they were scarcely used, support began with Windows 95 OSR 2 in Aug-97. And relatively new computers were only a fraction of the market. But the real market driver was the PC.
You can attempt to rewrite history all you like but as someone who lived it there was a clear shift in the market pre-iMac and post-iMac. Less than a year after the iMac shipped there was at least an order of magnitude more USB devices than had been available previously. Every manufacturer jumped on the bandwagon. Funny enough you can't even question it - a ton of those devices used iMac-like translucency, color, or both.
I was a diehard PC user way back then but even I wasn't shameless enough to claim the iMac had nothing to do with pushing USB forward.
The change to USB was on the move already much before the iMac launches. Just check magazines since the end of 97, there are reviews of products before the launch. The iMac rode the wave with the rest. Sure a few USB peripherals would have been made translucent, so what?
I'm not saying the iMac was the sole driver of USB adoption nor even the majority of it... but it definitely had an impact far larger than the Mac's tiny marketshare at the time would otherwise indicate. A big enough impact to help drive USB adoption overall.
So many peripherals were still PS/2 (for mice), parallel (eg Zip/Tape drives), or serial (soooooo many things especially bespoke, industrial, or specialized equipment).
Think about it: do all PCs have USB ports? Definitely not. Do all PCs have a serial port? 99% yes. You're a manufacturer making a non-top-100 product. Do you use the new-fangled USB or do you use a serial FIFO? Obviously you use serial. That maximizes your audience.
But the iMac changed the thinking: This new iMac thing is hot. Seems like Apple is on the rise again. If I want to sell to these customers (who are more affluent and known to buy more software/accessories) I don't have a choice: it must be USB. I know the majority of the PC install base doesn't have USB yet but most new PCs do so I can still reach a lot of the PC audience. So the next version of my product uses USB (or a USB-FIFO bridge). As more of the market switched to USB even existing PC users installed USB expansion cards.
Would USB have eventually gotten there? Yes. Would it have done so as quickly? I don't think so. The wide-open nature of the PC has always been both its boon and bane. See the many attempts to supplant x86 in the PC world, the several attempts to replace or expand ISA before PCI, etc.
What you're completely sidestepping is that the iMac did not just have USB ports, it only had USB ports. They retired all the legacy ports at the same time as they moved to USB. Forcing all their users to move to USB for peripherals. That was the big difference.
I'm not sidestepping it. My point was of mass market adoption and innovation.
I remember testing the original iMac at a computer trade fair back in it's day, and I was not impressed at all. For me it was a cheap looking plastic computer that didn't have a floppy drive (but hey they sold you one) and _forced_ you into an integrated monitor.
Your opinion doesn’t change the fact that USB was niche before Apple went all in on USB. When people give praise to Apple for making something mainstream that’s all they mean. Apple has a tendency to set trends and be rewarded for that.
Check my other comment for data and arguments. USB was already pretty much standard in new PCs and all kind of peripherals were available many months before iMac release. By the time the iMac was released the yearly computer sales were in the 90 million range >90% PCs, easily were 10s of millions of PCs USB equipped by Aug-1998. I find it hard to justify that a computer that sold 5 million units over 3 years made USB mainstream.
You can see USB ports in computer adverstised in the magazine I linked. Laptops and desktops alike. A majority of PC chipsets had support for it since at least Aug97:
It's an entirely predictable thing, but I find that at my age (53) I've started being kind of stunned at how some aspects of computing history have become just that to younger people: History, with perhaps no more real bearing on the hear-and-now for younger people than, say, the Teapot-Dome scandal.
I've had a number of conversations with people in the last few years who didn't work through the 90s, and who therefore had NO idea the absolutely stranglehold MSFT had on computing in that era. And I get it; it's hard to see today, when we have 5 or 6 viable platforms to work on (two flavors of mobile; Mac; Windows; ChromeOS; Linux). The degree to which being non-Windows in that era put you in a bit of a desert, especially as Apple hit its darkest years, is really really difficult to grasp now.
If you try to explain the wildly predatory things MSFT did, like insisting that every computer sold include a Windows license, they just sound like evil overlord plots. "Whoa, that can't be right..."
And maybe the biggest one is the fact that Apple itself -- now a juggernaut of profitability and stability, and a real leader in the industry on several fronts -- very nearly went under, which would've taken with it the only other viable desktop OS of the time, further cementing Redmond's domination.
Its recovery, starting with the iMac, is absolutely one of the greatest turnarounds in American business history.
Obviously, it wasn't all Steve, and required a lot of things to go their way, but the results are still amazing to me.
And yet: If you're 25, Apple has ALWAYS been who Apple is today. If you're 25, we've always had great options for computing environments with near-parity experiences. If you're 25, no single vendor has had anything like the kind of market power MSFT had.
It's a weird thing to realize the events of your early adulthood have become paragraphs in history books but here we are.
The iMac G3 was the very first computer I got to use. Our school district had several in every classroom and a couple computer labs. I distinctly remember using Scholastic software called Reading Counts, as well as KidPix on OS 9. Eventually, some of the older G3s got replaced with the eMac running OS X and then the district switched completely over to running Windows XP on Dell. That brief exposure to Apple and the creative colors makes me miss the times when using computers felt fun.
I think the closest I felt to that later on was around the time when Vista came out and everyone was using WindowBlinds to change their theme up.
Our school didn’t have any in each classroom, but rather a dedicated computer lab with enough for the entire class. Surprisingly they were loaded with a few games and learning we could play Cro-Mag Rally multiplayer over LAN while the teacher wasn’t paying attention is a core memory of mine.
Although the first computer I used was a Macintosh Classic, the iMac G3 rev. C was the first I used to browse the internet, and the lack of games was a bless as because of that I learned to program out of teenager's curiosity. Although I now use Linux in a PC and I don't like Apple anymore, in that era up until snow leopard it was a pleasure to use.
The iMac hasn't had a significant design change since the G5. It was almost like the progression was in terms of form factor. Now that they've switched to laptop components, they've achieved the compactness they wanted.
The "Ruby" iMac was the first Apple computer I could afford to buy, and I loved it.
In fact, I still have it and it works beautifully (except for the CD tray, which to my knowledge is unrepairable as there are no replacement devices out there - I have to use a firewire external instead).
I'd used Apple computers throughout art school in the 90s, and absolutely loved the UI. I used Windows NT at work, and the iMac at home. Back then I used Earthlink to get online and check my email. I used Macromedia products for web design. And Adobe products for, well, photoshop mainly. Later in the early 2000's when I saw people upgrading to OS X, I clung to 9.2.2 and made that machine keep that OS forever. I later got an iBook with OS X and loved the new experience, but I always missed (and still do) the look and feel and sounds of the earlier OS.
Simply opening and closing the Control Strip was a joy.
> I later got an iBook with OS X and loved the new experience, but I always missed (and still do) the look and feel and sounds of the earlier OS.
>
> Simply opening and closing the Control Strip was a joy.
It’s too bad that Classic Mac OS soundsets didn’t make the cut when selecting features to bring over to OS X. I can understand why they might disabled by default but they would’ve been nice to have as an option.
Same for Appearance Manager themes, really. That feature was never really marketed much and many users probably didn’t even know they existed since OS 8.5-9.2 only included Platinum, but it was cool to have theming capabilities on par with the third party Kaleidoscope (which is unparalleled on modern operating systems — not even Linux can compare) built right in, but that’s just not something that could’ve happened worth Jobs at the helm.
A couple of years ago I discovered a way to make my modern Macs produce the “bonnng” chime on boot-up. It’s actually still there but hidden for some reason. IIRC I had to enable it via the Terminal, which seemed really weird. But it was a total joy when it sprang back to life.
For a while there it was off by default, but I'm fairly sure it's back to being on out of the box on current machines. It's also now exposed through the UI: Settings > Sound > Play sound on startup.
I bought one in November 1998 ($1299 then, roughly $2400 today). It was an upgrade for me from an ancient Mac SE I’d had since 1990. The thing that struck me then was how easy the online purchase process was. There were very few options to pick from. It looks like I ordered it on 10/24/98 and had it by 10/28/98, which too was fast compared to other online computer purchases I’d done that year.
And…it just worked out of the box. No messing around with IRQs and other tweaks that I had to use with my work day systems. Software was limited but IIRC Microsoft had updated Office as part of the earlier deal with Apple, and between Office, the dotMac suite, and web browser you could do most routine things just fine.
Apple just totally nailed the end to end experience of buying, shipping, and using the system, which was a refreshing change from the status quo those days.
I was using a similarly spec'ed home-built PC at that time. It was an ugly beige box with a 15" beige monitor. I convinced my girlfriend to buy that Bondi-Blue box with only USB ports as she needed a new computer for her upcoming semester. We purchased it at the on-campus "Apple Store". It was the slickest computer buying experiences EVER. We had a Gateway 2000 store in town around that time. Trying to buy a computer there was such a nightmare. Apple really figured out the "experience" part of buying and owning a computer.
I can kind of understand. Apple at that time period wasn't very "think different" yet. Gil Amelio still had the company in its own "beige box" era. The idea that a store would be selling a "less compatible" computer seemed insane. Turned out to be a game changer.
The thing is, Apple is still the leader in the online ordering process, even though the competition has had decades to catch up. Dell’s website is a mess. For years the top result on Google for the XPS Developer Edition was a page saying they didn’t make it anymore, even though I had just read a blog post about the new one. Clicking a specific configuration sometimes makes the option for a previously available configuration disappear. It’s maddening.
Same for HP and Lenovo. Those sites are such a disaster and I'm surprised that nobody in their sales orgs are raising hell. There has to be lost sales due to not being able to easily find things. Those sites are incredibly slow as well.
I would assume for dell, hp, and lenovo, corporate sales through other channels drive the majority of sales so consumer facing websites are left to rot.
I suspect, but don't know, that there's a healthy halo of synergy between consumer products and enterprise choices, where that at all makes sense. Can go in both directions, people wanting to also have the good products they use at home in the office and vice versa.
I think there are stories of companies exploiting this, Microsoft with Windows and MS Works and Office, Apple and their angling on education, Adobe cultivating future Photoshop professionals in various formal and informal ways (a relationship they've since shit all over).
I was a kid at the time and they nailed the experience for me, too. My parents were shopping in Microcenter but I was drawn to the "thunk -- wheee!" noises from the apple store, which turned out to be other kids playing Bugdom on a lime green iMac. Just look at the comments:
My parents were confronted with a wall of special deals competing on numbers and specs... or the computer their kid was nagging them to buy. They went with the iMac.
A lot of stores had "Apple Sections". Cambridge MA Microcenter still has an apple room. Or compUSAs (a sort of big box computer store, now defunct) had an Apple "Store within a store".
There was a room in Microcenter that had a bunch of iMacs in it. I didn't know the commercial arrangement. I just knew that there was a fun green computer with a blue bug and you had to kick walnuts, avoid slugs, and free the ladybugs.
Apple was doing the store-in-a-store thing at CompUSA and MicroCenter and maybe a few other chains. The employees worked for the chain but went to special training from Apple to be able to talk up the Mac stuff. Very similar to their deal today with Best Buy.
I bought my first PowerBook from such a section of CompUSA. That CompUSA was a good half hour drive from me and out of my way. I had to make a special trip to go pick it up.
What was cool about these set up is Apple apparently directed the stocking so they had Mac compatible accessories and Max boxed software. While the Mac had just fewer boxed titles in total than the PC the fact few stores rarely/barely stocked what existed made the disparity seem worse than it was.
And even if you didn't injure yourself, good luck keeping a circular mouse oriented correctly without constantly having to look down at the damn thing. To this day I'm amazed that Jobs allowed such an obvious gaffe.
Not the greatest mouse, but totally fine to use for me at the time.
I had one at home, and my day job was using grown up Macs so I was using both.
I don’t get the orientation complaints; how do people not have instant special awareness of the mouse orientation from just holding and moving it and the feel of the weight of the cable hanging out the front.
My hot take is that people just don’t like something different.
Like the Magic Mouse - to me the MM is the greatest mouse ever. Thankfully Apple don’t listen to YouTubers constantly bitching about it LOL
It’s part of the holy trinity of MS-DOS hardware configuration settings: port, IRQ, DMA channel.
When you installed a card like Sound Blaster so your PC games could actually play some passable music and sound effects, you’d configure these settings with physical jumpers on the card. And then you have to pass those configuration settings to the game somehow so it can send data to the device.
You could leave the card to its default settings, but then it might collide with another device like a printer or whatever.
It was an essential part of 90's PC configuration hell.
IRQ is short for "Interrupt Request" and each peripheral or device that needs to interrupt the CPU for time-sensitive processing needed to be assigned one. There were only 16 of them with several hard coded for certain things like RTC. Since each serial port, parallel port, floppy controller, HDD controller, video card, sound card, etc needed an IRQ assignment it was not unusual to run out of free ones and resort to overloading one or more. This was less than ideal as now multiple drivers are waking up unnecessarily for the same IRQ.
Originally these were set with physical jumpers on the motherboard and expansion cards. Most things switched to being configured with software/BIOS when the industry moved to PCI bus.
Lack of standards for self-describing hardware and negotiating bus resources meant that when setting up old-school PCs you had[1] to manually point drivers to their devices’ I/O ports and interrupt lines (interrupt requests, or IRQs) [2] and occasionally resolve conflicts by reconfiguring jumpers on the devices themselves (the most familliar such jumper is probably the master/slave one on IDE drives, obsoleted by those twists in the ribbon cables).
All of this still needs to be solved in a modern system, but for the most part the hardware, firmware, and OS will sort things out by themselves—even if some of the details of that process are liable to give you nightmares[3,4]. The iMac, for its part, solved this by not having any expandability at all (ISA or PCI), so the settings could be burned into the firmware.
[2] I don’t think this was ever a problem for address ranges for memory-mapped I/O, UMA issues excepted,—perhaps because MMIO didn’t really become popular until PCI won and ACPI appeared?
333 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] thread- The colors screamed "I use a computer but am not a computer person". Back then, culturally, being a computer person was not as accepted as it is now.
- The slightly translucent plastic allowed you to see a little bit of the innards, but not so clearly. This gave the computer case some depth and complexity that you would never otherwise get in "cheap" molded plastic.
- The iMac was underpowered even at introduction. But it showed that computers had already reached the point at which they have more processing power than needed to accomplish almost anything you needed a computer for.
- The stacking of the internal components and the location of the vents allowed the computer to be fanless yet have sufficient cooling. Convection created by the heat of the CRT generated airflow to cool the CPU.
...is that actually true? Because it launched with a 233MHz G3, and although my memory is hazy, I remember people specifically pointing out that on most available cross-platform benchmarks it beat whatever Pentium II was current then.
That situation didn't last, but I have specific memories of "This is a cheap home computer that's faster than Dell's highest end tower".
Ditto with G4's and similar cycled Pentium III's.
From Wikipedia:
> The PowerPC 7xx is a family of third generation 32-bit PowerPC microprocessors designed and manufactured by IBM and Motorola (spun off as Freescale Semiconductor bought by NXP Semiconductors)
The other thing to remember, is that computers were only barely powerful enough back then. Powerful models felt powerful precisely because we were desperate for every last CPU cycle we could get.
The bottle neck was always macOS 9 which was a pretty rudimentary OS by today's standards.
It was a bit of a sore spot For a while there.
Apple has a looooong history of cherrpicking benchmarks, especially when their arch wasn't as fast as competing Intels.
The introduction of Safari is an underrated milestone in changing that, and I would suggest the Mac didn’t really match the Windows browsing experience inclusive of Flash until the introduction of Intel Macs.
One of the more tragic examples, from the perspective of laptop buyers, was the WallStreet PowerBooks. They started at $2300 and was easily 30% faster than the high end 3400s that were $4-5k. The original G3 PowerBook (Kanga) was over $5k. It was a huge boost in power for half the price and honestly much better industrial design. The 3400 was a chonky boi.
It is not.
One cool thing about the appliance computing revolution (phones and vg consoles) is that now most people don't have computers again and "being a computer person" is a thing again.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2011/07/19/apple...
https://mspoweruser.com/ipad-statistics/
Several of them don't own computers and rely entirely on smartphones for their computing needs.
It's frankly a worrying trend. Smartphones are consumer devices that do not allow the kind of automation, tinkering, scripting, and ownership that computers do.
On the flip side it means that I will be more competitive in the job market as I grow older than I was expecting.
A huge part of the mac user base at that time were writers/editorial staff and graphic designers. I don't know if we lump them in the "computer person" crowd as they basically spend their day in front of a computer, but yes, to them the colors were really well received, as a salvation from the beige world they had to deal with.
The same way people covered their macbooks in stickers and skins to get away from the uniform metallic gray canvas.
– "We're not so different you and I"
There's a difference between glued-on extras - which are more like car customisation - and stylish integrated design.
A friend of mine used to joke about design-for-men being anything that was black and ribbed - which most PC cases are. If you add RGB to something black and ribbed, it's still black and ribbed - but now it has RGB stuck on it.
The curves, colour wraparound, and white translucent plastic of the iMac were the opposite of that. Everything was integrated into a whole - which was actually a nice metaphor for where Apple were trying to go in general.
Ironically, except for macs. Macs only come in solid metalic colors, at best.
[0] https://ja.aliexpress.com/item/1005003555409345.html
PCs and older Macs were boring, and so were the people who used them and talked about them.
So what if it had 253 Megasnerds and an extra fast blibbyblop? It was boring and beige. No one cared.
The iMac was exciting and fun, and so was anyone who bought one and used one.
You could get a row of them in different colours for your design office, and they'd look stunning. Clients would walk in and literally say "Wow!"
The magic worked in any SME office that wasn't trying to look boringly corporate - which turned out to be a lot of offices.
Absolute marketing masterpiece to make the design a marketing statement - not just for Apple itself, but for any creative or service provider who bought one.
You're sitting smoking up in a tiny dorm and the most dominant item almost certainly was your computer. Having it be Bondi Blue colored with beautiful curves made that experience much nicer.
Not that I can remember.
Chic. Not geek.
The marketing claim during the introduction couldn’t have been more fitting and for everything that followed after coming out of apple.
Yes to this!
I was in academia when I switched from Windows to Mac, and UNIX was a big factor.
Incidentally, my first Mac was an iMac G4.
Why does being unix based matter? I imagine if you are doing server stuff you are on Linux/Unix. If you are doing C stuff, you are doing it closer to the end device. If you are doing visual stuff you are doing it on Windows since they have us by the balls.
Maybe if you are making iOS apps, but that wouldn't be until the end of the semi-replaceable era.
Maybe doing web dev? Yeah probably not, you'd be doing windows with firefox, chrome, and IE for front end.
Even in this modern era where Microsoft cannot be trusted and Linux Desktop still cannot handle NVIDIA, people are still choosing to do dev work on those system. The only time I see using Macs is for iOS dev only. (Maybe you might SSH into a server for backend stuff, but 25 year old computers can do that)
I'd imagine these necessary tools for Linux server dev/admin are also readily available on Mac, if not installed already. Now, is that worth the price delta? Probably not, but given the sparsity of pre installed, supported Linux hardware I can potentially see the appeal.
That is why I even bothered with GNU/Linux to start with.
OS X adoption by UNIX crowd proved the point that for a large majority of development community, GNU/Linux itself is irrelevant, what they care about is a POSIX like experience.
Hence Microsoft learning by their Windows NT/POSIX management mistakes, and creating WSL to fill that gap.
For those of us running Virtual Box and VMWare for years, it only brings the convinience of one product less to care about.
I wanted to check the Internet price on something, and asked an employee whether any of the demo computers had connectivity. It turned out that only the Mac did.
As I started using it, I remembered that I used to be an Apple user, and it would be easier to find commercial software that worked for it, and it was actually UNIX. Terminal and everything.
So, I stopped component shopping and headed to my local Apple Store later that week. Bought a G5 tower and I’ve never looked back.
The other alternative was Windows 2000/XP, almost no one was caring for GNU/Linux other than on the servers.
I was part of the initial group having a go at Scientific Linux, and there weren't that many users of it when I left in 2004.
In fact for many years, not sure about nowadays, the IT official policy was that installing GNU/Linux, even Scientific Linux, meant the users were on their own, the only UNIX desktop that they would officially support was OS X.
I also prototype natively and locally even though I eventually deploy to Linux. Lower level C code (with the odd #ifdef), and compilers and tooling for more niche languages all work perfectly fine.
The latter is a bigger point than it may seem. There is still a lot of open source software that is not working well as it should on Windows, particularly compilers and libraries.
If you were a kid or wanted to get involved with web development or other stuff you had a supported consumer platform, with consumer software and this hidden mode that gave you access to all of the Unix toolset.
You have to remember - there was no docker back in the day, no WSL, and linux laptops were for a tiny niche group of hard core people.
When OS X came out, you could buy basically for the first time a good, lightweight but powerful laptop which would run most of your favorite Unix code as well as Office, Photoshop, etc. and had 5-6 hours of battery life because you didn’t have to disable power saving to avoid kernel panics. That wasn’t perfect, of course, but a ton of early web stalwarts like Perl, PHP, MySQL ran better than on Windows with decent fidelity for anyone deploying on Linux or Solaris.
I bought Apple stock starting around 2001 when I noticed that in addition to traditional markets like design, I was going to hackathons or conferences like USENIX and seeing half the attendees with titanium PowerBooks. It’s hard to imagine now but at the time that was pretty speculative since their finances were still lean in the pre-iPod era (if I’d been willing to make a bigger gamble I’d probably be writing this from a yacht).
I still don’t understand why investors didn’t understand Apple’s subscription accounting and how it meant that their quarterly iPhone profits were something like 1/16th their actual iPhone profits.
But I really only use Macs because it’s the easiest unix machine for me to use. I don’t know of another laptop where everything works and I also natively have a shell and unix. I know there are ways to get close to this but they are all one more step and I don’t care enough to bother.
If there was a Linux laptop with a decent desktop and packaging manager I never had to think about that cost the same as mac, I would switch in an instant.
I know Ubuntu has been trying for years to achieve this but, we're a long way off.
If it didn't matter, Apple wouldn't have spent big money on Mac-is-Unix advertising campaign.
https://infinigeek.com/assets/apple_unix_ad-s.jpg
MS didn’t rewrite Windows internals to support WSL for the love of open source. They did it because most dev work happens on Linux (and now macs). Macs get to use that for free. Microsoft had to do work itself to support NodeJS and Docker, for example, and they became available on Windows many years after they were available on Linux/MacOS.
Docker, especially, was a piece of software that for many years was almost necessary for dev teams. And for many years you couldn’t use it if you were on Windows.
And having a Unix shell out of the box was/is easier than dealing with Cygwin and its alternatives.
Windows is better these days because the cloud dragged Microsoft into doing something about its shell experience. But even now Windows versions of things like Curl are half-assed versions.
Even Docker, for example, runs natively on Linux and Macs and doesn’t on Windows (or didn’t initially at least…heck it wasn’t even available on Windows for many years until MS itself worked with Docker to bring it to Windows).
NodeJS took 2 years to come to Windows, again with MS having to work with Joyent yo achieve this, but was available on Linux and Mac from the outset.
It runs natively on Linux. On Macs it starts a Linux VM and then does containers inside that, which adds overhead (and seems to preallocate a lot of ram).
Other than that yes, you can have a working GUI and a unixy enough command line on the same machine. And that's why I switched to macs... from linux.
And one thing I don’t read much about for these original iMacs is how nice the screen was. It was a CRT, but it had a nice anti-glare coating and could have the resolution increased to 1024x768 which wasn’t typical for a 15” screen at the time.
So the feature set was very nice… ignoring the hockey puck mouse!
The fact that it could run Quake3 is kind of the point as it didn’t need “all that power.”
The complaint I had was that for the price I could get a more powerful wintel box.
Comically this is no longer true with mac laptops and it’s kind of weird to see it flipped where MacBooks have powerful processors and decent levels of ram (although sticking with 8gb in the air seems like they are just sticking to the principle that you don’t need lots of ram rather than saving the $9 for 16 or 32).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMachines_eOne
And Compaq had the all-in-one form factor back in 1995
https://twitter.com/InsaneWardy/status/841219290539970560
It’s not so much how bad the windows os (I have to admin my kids gaming pc) but it’s inability to run many dev packages that are first or only on Unix. It’s possible to run WSL or Cygwin or other Unix interfaces and get stuff working. But it’s extra steps and I want to simplify.
Instead, it came out the following year with the introduction of the iBook. [1]
FireWire did not exist on the iMac right away though... but it also was not at all common on Wintel machines at the time.
10/100 Base-T Ethernet, something standard on even the original iMac [2], was also not commonplace on Wintel machines. Packing a 56k modem in from the start was also a nice move on Apple's part to ensure you had the chance to get the fastest internet possible over a standard landline, which is how the majority of internet users accessed the internet at the time.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3
I think it's part of the product line differentiation. I do all my development on a macbook air (well, some of the compilation is done on a remote machine, fr code that will run there). It's great: conveniently very light and with plenty of power.
Sure, some people need a ton of VMs, but I don't. But Apple points out that if you're a "professional" you ought to be using a "Pro" machine and the RAM is one way they do it.
Yes, but then you’re stuck with an Asus. Having been there before, that’s a hard pass. The real comparison for Macbooks are higher end models like Thinkpads.
It might sound silly but this a big thing for me. It’s disconcerting for a laptop to sound like an angry banshee when I’m pushing it, and my 16” M1 Max MBP doesn’t. It’s also why I sold the gaming laptop and replaced it with a desktop, because quiet high performance x86 laptops are apparently hard to come by.
- Use Apple Silicon, run Docker in QEMU and enjoy idle temps of 70-80c when building for production
OR
- Use an old Intel Mac, use "native" Docker and get slightly shorter build times and a marginally cooler system
Looking back on it, the only engineers there with quiet laptops were the ones using Linux on x86 hardware. It was simply what we deployed to, as an SaaS business.
This should become less of a problem as it becomes more normal to maintain dual-architecture Docker setups. There’s also the possibility that “shipping the jungle” will fall back out of favor, which would fix various other papercuts that result from Docker’s tight coupling with Linux.
If you are going to compare crap from Asus with something Apple makes, as if they're even remotely comparable, then we can just stop right there.
That's the problem with whipping out the spec sheet: low-end commodity machines will always have a better price than anything Apple makes. Never mind that it sounds like a 737 if you dare open more than one browser tab, and your eyes will prematurely go bad from the fuzzy screen, hey, you didn't pay the "Apple tax"!
And $400 extra to get a 1TB SSD? Seriously?
It’s such an obvious little quality of life improvement, and yet the only other board I’ve come across with the feature is the HHKB Pro 2 (Pro 3 drops the hub) and some variants of Das Keyboards.
[0] the swappable USB cable is so handy! Just leave one plugged into each machine.
I haven't booted since maybe 2005 and I'm starting to wonder if there is battery on the motherboard I should remove.
https://books.google.com/books?id=2Zt0sZTS_0IC&lpg=PP1&dq=oc...
The mouse was the first laser mouse I ever used and I believe it connected with USB, which was novel at the time. It was probably the most impressive thing about the iMac for me personally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_puck_mouse
I remember the later G3 education models my school had having a "laser" (I assume LED?) mouse.
Likely the iMac went the same way.
That was my favorite part of the hockey puck mouse - it was one of those little moments of "surprise and delight" from Apple. And alas, I can't find a good video of it online.
I double-take at statements like this. I forget how much variation in experience there was. But, being in the SF Bay Area, we were able to read Computer Shopper etc. and carpool to the South Bay to get whatever we wanted. I recall trips to will-call doors at warehouses, as well as private sellers in small apartments. I guess I was spoiled for choice.
I distinctly remember having a 15" monitor that did 1024x768 around 1992, and working out the X modelines to use it with Slackware by 1994. I went higher from there as I got my hands on bigger 17" or 21" monitors. I'm pretty sure my 21" Nanao was usually running at 1600x1200 a couple years later. I always felt that image quality and keyboards were worth investing in, since I would spend so much time exposed to them.
As far as I recall, we often had to trade off lower color depth for higher resolutions, since framebuffer VRAM was usually limited. A lot of time was spent in 8-bit psuedo color palette modes with XFree86 before eventually using 15/16 bit "true color" modes. I don't think 24-bit made much sense until later with 3D accelerators that had more VRAM.
And wow, "true color" modes - now I remember having to make that choice, too! 8-bit with higher res, or 16-bit (I think it was described as "thousands of colors" at the time... and it looks like there was some scandal around the phrase "millions of colors" that Apple used: https://lowendmac.com/2018/millions-of-colors-vs-thousands-w...
The iMac had a fairly dim shadow mask display that shipped with most budget computers of the era. They were also one of the more common components to prematurely fail in iMacs.
The G3 was one heck of a CPU.
The only thing these machines suffered from was USB 1.1. ZIP drives, CD burners and scanners were all much faster in their SCSI versions. You could see USB was clearly the future, but not an immediate one.
People forget how it launched a complete craze of transparent plastics. Vacuums, kitchen appliances, disk drives[1], printers... EVERYTHING became colorful and transparent.
[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/256182420094
Uh, in my country that was exactly the reverse. Macs were for creation people: journalists, writers, audio and video producers, press people, cinema, poster designs, comic books... everything multimedia related.
If you knew what CMYK/RGB does mean, you'd probably be using a Mac at work.
Also it didn't feel like Apple was for consumers until the iPod came out.
In Portugal, nowadays there are Apple Stores all over the big cities, although people still mostly buy them on credit and cable TV deals, back in those days there was a single vendor, Interlog in Lisbon, that would sell for the whole country.
Buying Apple gear meant either traveling to Lisbon, having them coming to the company if big enough or a renowed university, or buying by catalog in the listings from computer magazines.
Here's the quote from the article.
> But Apple reasoned that most people were consumers, not creators.
Projects like the iMac were already underway before jobs returned under the wings of Amelio. In the same way the whole focus on education and the simplification to 4 computer types was later attributed to Jobs once Gil was out.
That said, there was 10 month between Gil being ousted and the iMac being revieled so there was plenty of time for Jobs to put the finishing touches on that one could argue was what a lot of Apple products really needed at that time. But I suspect under Gil it would have been called something stupid like 'Machintosh for internet - 7400E'.
But true that many of the operational changes of the company mostly came from Gil. But also Bertrand Serlet, Avie Tevanian etc deserve a lot of credit for shaking up the software and hardware teams.
https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Power_Macintosh_G3_All-In-One
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300
The photo in the Wikipedia article isn't very good. The actual color of the translucent plastic is a brighter teal, fairly close to the "Bondi Blue" of the iMac that followed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_9600
Also reminded me that Apple actually sold a dual 604e / 200 MHz system in the OS 8 era. I'm guessing the only software that could have made use of the second processor would have been some specially optimized routines in Photoshop or similar.
But it had many of the core pillars e.g. remote home directories, remote/RPC applications. NeXT in particular with frameworks like EOF/PDO pushed for more network centric desktop applications.
It doesn't sound like much today but were pretty new concepts for GUI users.
The reason I mentioned it was that there was talk that the iMac was going to be potentially the first consumer-grade thin client.
The JavaStation ran JavaOS, not Solaris. Not sure about the Sun Rays.
To my knowledge, NeXT never supported a diskless config. (Or did they?? Did anyone work with that?)
Diskless may have been an option when NeXT software was detached from NeXT hardware, though.
https://wiki.preterhuman.net/NeXTcube_running_68030_and_6804...
I get what you're saying — I'm just remembering Jobs demoing how his NeXT user account was remote and any NeXT machine he sat down on and logged into suddenly became "his" computer.
That's the "thin" client I'm thinking of. But maybe that's just "client".
That’s something that thin clients also promise, but doesn’t require using thin clients.
Its claim to fame was bringing the term Architecture Astronaut into common parlance.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...
In retrospect, it's quite funny in light of how webapps and Cloud evolved. As Spolsky predicted in 1998:
"between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can’t think of a single useful thing to build for us"
"And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn’t stop him."
Go ahead, try and take away that feature now, see if any customers complain.
NeXT rendering engine was display postscript and they had a common set-up of rendering the DPS on a remote computer while logged in over a network. The overall set-up meant that all the data was at headquarters and users could login in from any location and have a local DPS rendering of the centralized user account.
Amelio simplified the product categories down to four. They were still full of garbage--Jobs made the real difference there. He got rid of all the trash peripherals and replaced the (many) computer lines with only the iMac.
Amelio failed to cut the printer/accessory divisions which were mostly just selling rebadged hardware from other companies. He kept the Newton division even though it was not on a trajectory to success (I say this as a long time Newton fan). He also kept around far more Mac SKUs than were necessary (Performas, education-only SKUs). That's all stuff Jobs cut when he came back.
Amelio had the unenviable task of righting a sinking ship. He didn't necessarily do a bad job at it but acqui-merging with Next and getting Jobs back was the best choice he made during his tenure.
In a way Gil probably would have done very well working under Jobs but once you are in the CEO seat, there is no chance of taking that demotion.
I thought it looked like a bubblegum toy computer for kids so I didn't want one. I was a kid myself, but hey, all the computers I was familiar with were serious beige boxes and this didn't seem "professional" enough. But I was intrigued.
I'm also intrigued about the "Princess Bride" analogy in the article, I'm still processing that. Is SJ being compared to Cary Elwes or am I missing the joke?
There's a scene where the Man in Black is barely alive / awake after taking The Miracle Pill, while Fezzik and Inigo are telling him he has to help them stop the wedding and rescue the princess. He says "and our assets?" As little as they have, it just happens to be exactly what they need to give them an advantage.
I suppose if Steve Jobs came in and asked someone at Apple to list their assets, then yes, he's being compared to the Man in Black, as he's asked to save the day!
> With Jobs’ brains, Jony Ive’s designs, and the new PowerPC G3 chip supplied by Motorola, the company began to form a plan.
I understand your need to take a dig at Apple, but the current iMac comes in orange, purple, pink, yellow, blue, green and silver.
It’s also a timeless design. The 2008 unibody MacBooks look like they could have been made brand new yesterday, with the only giveaways being the I/O and the bezels on the display.
It’s safe to say that the design will almost certainly (reasonably) never get old.
Then I started using it and wondered what people actually used it for, it seemed to do nothing I was used to doing on other computers.
And even though now it's obvious why you'd buy a Mac, that's been my relationship with them ever since! Hardware envy, but I like Linux too much to leave it behind.
That was what the “i” in “iMac” was for. It had a built-in 56K modem, with an RJ-11 jack.
My story diverged from yours when one of my Mac using friends said "Apple is releasing a Unix based OS." I thought "oh please make it Unix with an awesome GUI." I was so tired of working on my GUI in linux instead of working with it. I just wanted Wi-Fi to work, I wanted wake from sleep to work consistently, I didn't want my graphics drivers to break or be so much different to configure on a different device. I wanted a consistent trackpad experience. And Apple delivered. Some of my happiest feelings of my first Mac, the 12" mbp, were about how little I used it because I was able to open it, quickly do what I wanted, and then close it. I had been using Linux as my daily driver, but switched to OS X 10.2.6, and have been there ever since. Between then and now I've used a fair variety of unixes for work, like aix, hpux, solaris, FreeBSD, and linux, and I've never been without at least a few Linux boxes at my house, but I find that the macOS GUI does the best job of getting out of the way so I can get to work.
Every once in a while I try out a Linux GUI, hoping that I'll be compelled to give it a shot as my primary work environment. I have an old Thinkpad that I keep loaded with some desktop flavor, but I always run into things that steer me back to macOS.
I was exposed to NeXTSTEP on my job then and loved it. And I was using FreeBSD at home.
Then Mac OS X came, basically NeXTSTEP with some FreeBSD and a gorgeous GUI. Shut up and take my money…
(EDIT: This is HN, we all know that integrated CPUs/GPUs are not what is referred to as GPU.
Please don't be pedantic. )
I was on Win95 on laptops in the 90s, and that was a complete dumpster fire. Sleep never worked, long boot times, etc. But at the time, I was mostly producing documents and presentations, and Office was file-format-consistent across both platforms. I saw how a colleague's Powerbook worked, and bought my own. It was a HUGE improvement even though it was pre-OSX.
Then the firm tanked, and I went back to coding (LAMP stuff) at about the same time OSX was released. I upgraded and never looked back.
Having a machine where zsh is a click away and on which I can ALSO run Excel is wonderful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kR6Kwcr6tU
However, after a while the design language was picked up by other brands ... and you could see translucent and coloured plastic on pretty much all types of products for a while: from PCs to home electronics to toilet paper holders, and by then it started to feel a little tacky.
I hate reading how easily humans are exploited.
You’ve commented hundreds of times on a site that is the marketing campaign of a VC firm.
The keyboard is fine though laptop-sized with cramped arrow keys, but the original revision iMac puck mouse is a famous case of form over function. It's not actually as bad as its reputation suggests, but Apple still silently admitted to the flawed design by adding a little centered dimple to the butan on the later five-colors version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_puck_mouse
“There's no reason that the Macintosh won't be an absolutely perfect gaming platform for anything that you wanna do. […] The only thing that you wanna do with a Mac as a serious gamer — you wanna pull out the silly one-button mouse and plug in a three-button mouse pretty quick, but aside from that…” — John Carmack, 1999 https://youtu.be/XzbFgzgy1mc?t=4791
I'm actually looking for a similar kind of mouse for my small child today. He can't quite palm a mouse very well, and he often gets mixed up with right click and scroll and scroll click. When I get him focused on the right mouse button he can play some basic mouse-based games but he'll often end up getting distracted by the mouse wheel or right click which can sometimes drop him out of the games he's wanting to play.
Don't get me wrong the hockey puck mouse was probably atrocious for adult hands but as a little kid it was actually pretty nice.
Edit: but there is one concern - they are not optical mice and use a ball. So if they’re really young you might want something more like an apple pro mouse
1) They're all old and are of questionable state second hand.
2) They're all ball mice, as you mentioned there's issues with those over an optical mouse
3) They almost always have ridiculously short cables. They're designed to be used with the Apple USB keyboards which had the extra USB port on the side of the keyboard that they would plug into.
Sure, some of these problems could just be overlooked or solved with accessories but in the end I'd rather just have something new which I know will work well and won't require me to get a USB extension cable or whatever. I'd really like something in a similar enough form factor but wireless and optical.
I find using a single button mouse an interesting exercise - both windows and MacOS are usable without it, MacOS in particular you can still do ctrl+left click to get a right click. It sounds silly but when I use a mouse my left hand is still usually on the keyboard so it's not really a big deal.
I haven't done it in years, but I didn't really feel like I missed having 2 buttons and a scroll wheel when I used a 'pro mouse' lol.
Now, I could rant for a while about how awful the ergonomics of the magic mouse are!
Apple person: my computer can do anything yours can and better
window person: can you right-click?
The white ibook G4 was really the one I saw starting making dent at the pc market, especially with students.
It’s absolutely accurate to say the iMac is the product that launched the modern era of Apple. Had it been a flop the company likely would have gone under.
Do you have a number of units solds for the first gen imac G3 compared to say, the combined sales of all the Macintosh PowerMacintosh/Performa models of the generation before and the global growth of regular PC at the time?
My perception, and I emphasize in the word perception, because I lack numbers, is that the early imac and ibook were quite ridiculized for their appearance and the imac/ibook/probook series started being fashionable and successful items the generation after those: white ibook, flat LCD panel imac G4, titanium powerbooks...Those were the ones you would see elsewhere compared to the aquarium looking imac g3 and the clamshell "toilet seat" ibook that nobody wanted to be seen with. Hence me looking for numbers instead of praising news article written with rose tinted glasses and without sales numbers.
And I mean by that it may have saved apple temporarily by at least reversing/flattening the curb while not being a mega success. Macs were losing market share every year, just not losing more market share or gaining a little bit can be considered a success even without making a huge dent in the PC market.
I saw a chart that was showing the revenues and they didn't really grow from 1998 to 2000. The real increase started between 2001 - 2005 which correspond to the second gen imac and more importantly the ipod.
Having said that the apple share stopped declining after the first imace release so it may not have generated a lot of money but at least gave confidence in the market.
I wired it up in my little brothers(10) room. He would play nethack and make elaborate barcode based auth systems with it. A lot of fun. I still have strange dreams of running an entire office off terminals to this day. Strangely nobody has taken me up on it yet.
But the real lesson is do your part and help a poor high school kid.
The iMacs were pretty and started a lot of HW innovation but the actual experience of using them was not great. OS 8/OS 9 were still bad operating systems, and the first few releases of OS X were not very stable either.
They looked nice, but didn't work as well for us as the boring beige towers.
Mac OS 8 and 9 didn’t even have memory protection. A program with faulty memory management, which wasn’t uncommon since it was before the creation of the wonderful and magnificent Rust, could very well destroy the runtime memory of other programs and even the kernel…
I wouldn't call that particularly weird.
Apple had their hands on education for sure, as most buildings had at least one room with rows and rows of the blue iMacs. The library and others had publicly available iMacs.
I had a job doing inventory for the schools accounting department (not to be confused with Accounting, the education department) - I tagged a lot of computers. In competition with departments getting iMac’s were ones getting cheap, unpowered Dell desktops.
I also remember Nintendo 64s and their controllers coming in see-through cases. These cases were available in a variety of bright colours. Ref: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/87/ae/3c87ae0913e29c2109cc...
It can't all be rose tinted glasses; the world was genuinely more colourful back then.
That's not true. USB ports were already standard before the iMac release. A quick check of old PC World magazines from Dec-97 for example shows it. The iMac was released in Aug-98.
Apple innovated a lot, but frequently get credit for many that didn't come from them.
They only included USB on the original iMac, which was a death-knell for the legacy connectors, and quite controversial at the time given the iMac's place in the cultural zeitgeist.
Don't you consider the original Mac adoption of the 3.5" floppy drive as innovation?
Yes. USB ports certainly existed on PCs prior to the iMac's release in August 1998 and announcement in May 1998. They were, however, largely unused because of a lack of mass-market USB peripherals. Keyboards and mice used PS/2 ports. Printers (and ZIP drives!) used parallel ports. More expensive peripherals (storage and scanners) used SCSI. A handful of other devices used RS-232 serial. Go back to those old PC World magazines and look for the mass-market USB peripherals available for sale and let me know what you find.
Starting with the iMac-inspired Cambrian explosion in USB peripherals and for a rather lengthy period of time measured in years afterwards, it was actually rather difficult to find USB peripherals that were not made out of translucent plastic to match iMacs.
Apple wasn't the first to market with USB (and Snell didn't claim it was), but Apple most certainly drove its mass-market adoption.
"UNTIL RECENTLY , USB hardware was as scarce as hen's teeth . Now, after almost two years of foot-dragging, hardware companies are fina ll y delivering peripherals. We tested 18 of these new products"
Among the products there are keyboards, mouses, joysticks, cameras, scanners, speakers... you name it.
>Apple wasn't the first to market with USB (and Snell didn't claim it was), but Apple most certainly drove its mass-market adoption.
Sure they were scarcely used, support began with Windows 95 OSR 2 in Aug-97. And relatively new computers were only a fraction of the market. But the real market driver was the PC.
https://vintageapple.org/pcworld/
Edited to add link and page reference.
I was a diehard PC user way back then but even I wasn't shameless enough to claim the iMac had nothing to do with pushing USB forward.
So many peripherals were still PS/2 (for mice), parallel (eg Zip/Tape drives), or serial (soooooo many things especially bespoke, industrial, or specialized equipment).
Think about it: do all PCs have USB ports? Definitely not. Do all PCs have a serial port? 99% yes. You're a manufacturer making a non-top-100 product. Do you use the new-fangled USB or do you use a serial FIFO? Obviously you use serial. That maximizes your audience.
But the iMac changed the thinking: This new iMac thing is hot. Seems like Apple is on the rise again. If I want to sell to these customers (who are more affluent and known to buy more software/accessories) I don't have a choice: it must be USB. I know the majority of the PC install base doesn't have USB yet but most new PCs do so I can still reach a lot of the PC audience. So the next version of my product uses USB (or a USB-FIFO bridge). As more of the market switched to USB even existing PC users installed USB expansion cards.
Would USB have eventually gotten there? Yes. Would it have done so as quickly? I don't think so. The wide-open nature of the PC has always been both its boon and bane. See the many attempts to supplant x86 in the PC world, the several attempts to replace or expand ISA before PCI, etc.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/72
I remember testing the original iMac at a computer trade fair back in it's day, and I was not impressed at all. For me it was a cheap looking plastic computer that didn't have a floppy drive (but hey they sold you one) and _forced_ you into an integrated monitor.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/04/19Apple-Ships-5-Milli...
Edit typo.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/72
It's true however that until year change 97/98 USB devices were very rare. Windows got support half a year before in Aug97.
I've had a number of conversations with people in the last few years who didn't work through the 90s, and who therefore had NO idea the absolutely stranglehold MSFT had on computing in that era. And I get it; it's hard to see today, when we have 5 or 6 viable platforms to work on (two flavors of mobile; Mac; Windows; ChromeOS; Linux). The degree to which being non-Windows in that era put you in a bit of a desert, especially as Apple hit its darkest years, is really really difficult to grasp now.
If you try to explain the wildly predatory things MSFT did, like insisting that every computer sold include a Windows license, they just sound like evil overlord plots. "Whoa, that can't be right..."
And maybe the biggest one is the fact that Apple itself -- now a juggernaut of profitability and stability, and a real leader in the industry on several fronts -- very nearly went under, which would've taken with it the only other viable desktop OS of the time, further cementing Redmond's domination.
Its recovery, starting with the iMac, is absolutely one of the greatest turnarounds in American business history.
Obviously, it wasn't all Steve, and required a lot of things to go their way, but the results are still amazing to me.
And yet: If you're 25, Apple has ALWAYS been who Apple is today. If you're 25, we've always had great options for computing environments with near-parity experiences. If you're 25, no single vendor has had anything like the kind of market power MSFT had.
It's a weird thing to realize the events of your early adulthood have become paragraphs in history books but here we are.
I think the closest I felt to that later on was around the time when Vista came out and everyone was using WindowBlinds to change their theme up.
In fact, I still have it and it works beautifully (except for the CD tray, which to my knowledge is unrepairable as there are no replacement devices out there - I have to use a firewire external instead).
I'd used Apple computers throughout art school in the 90s, and absolutely loved the UI. I used Windows NT at work, and the iMac at home. Back then I used Earthlink to get online and check my email. I used Macromedia products for web design. And Adobe products for, well, photoshop mainly. Later in the early 2000's when I saw people upgrading to OS X, I clung to 9.2.2 and made that machine keep that OS forever. I later got an iBook with OS X and loved the new experience, but I always missed (and still do) the look and feel and sounds of the earlier OS.
Simply opening and closing the Control Strip was a joy.
It’s too bad that Classic Mac OS soundsets didn’t make the cut when selecting features to bring over to OS X. I can understand why they might disabled by default but they would’ve been nice to have as an option.
Same for Appearance Manager themes, really. That feature was never really marketed much and many users probably didn’t even know they existed since OS 8.5-9.2 only included Platinum, but it was cool to have theming capabilities on par with the third party Kaleidoscope (which is unparalleled on modern operating systems — not even Linux can compare) built right in, but that’s just not something that could’ve happened worth Jobs at the helm.
And…it just worked out of the box. No messing around with IRQs and other tweaks that I had to use with my work day systems. Software was limited but IIRC Microsoft had updated Office as part of the earlier deal with Apple, and between Office, the dotMac suite, and web browser you could do most routine things just fine.
Apple just totally nailed the end to end experience of buying, shipping, and using the system, which was a refreshing change from the status quo those days.
I think there are stories of companies exploiting this, Microsoft with Windows and MS Works and Office, Apple and their angling on education, Adobe cultivating future Photoshop professionals in various formal and informal ways (a relationship they've since shit all over).
Seems like a missed opportunity.
But I'm guessing that's the point - make it confusing and unusable to steer people to specific choices??
However, just because a device exists on PSREF doesn't mean it's actually available to purchase anywhere, particularly since COVID.
I guess part of it is having so few models to choose from, but maybe Dell, Lenovo, and HP don't actually need that many models in the first place...
https://youtu.be/Vmp720kBLBU?list=PLBCr5xCUF7KeUlGJRAYFwccqP...
My parents were confronted with a wall of special deals competing on numbers and specs... or the computer their kid was nagging them to buy. They went with the iMac.
https://www.cultofmac.com/452599/today-apple-history-apple-b...
I bought my first PowerBook from such a section of CompUSA. That CompUSA was a good half hour drive from me and out of my way. I had to make a special trip to go pick it up.
What was cool about these set up is Apple apparently directed the stocking so they had Mac compatible accessories and Max boxed software. While the Mac had just fewer boxed titles in total than the PC the fact few stores rarely/barely stocked what existed made the disparity seem worse than it was.
Speaking of Ambrosia, it looks like EV Nova is on GOG. Maybe I should give it another spin one of these days.
Not the greatest mouse, but totally fine to use for me at the time.
I had one at home, and my day job was using grown up Macs so I was using both.
I don’t get the orientation complaints; how do people not have instant special awareness of the mouse orientation from just holding and moving it and the feel of the weight of the cable hanging out the front.
My hot take is that people just don’t like something different.
Like the Magic Mouse - to me the MM is the greatest mouse ever. Thankfully Apple don’t listen to YouTubers constantly bitching about it LOL
When you installed a card like Sound Blaster so your PC games could actually play some passable music and sound effects, you’d configure these settings with physical jumpers on the card. And then you have to pass those configuration settings to the game somehow so it can send data to the device.
You could leave the card to its default settings, but then it might collide with another device like a printer or whatever.
IRQ is short for "Interrupt Request" and each peripheral or device that needs to interrupt the CPU for time-sensitive processing needed to be assigned one. There were only 16 of them with several hard coded for certain things like RTC. Since each serial port, parallel port, floppy controller, HDD controller, video card, sound card, etc needed an IRQ assignment it was not unusual to run out of free ones and resort to overloading one or more. This was less than ideal as now multiple drivers are waking up unnecessarily for the same IRQ.
Originally these were set with physical jumpers on the motherboard and expansion cards. Most things switched to being configured with software/BIOS when the industry moved to PCI bus.
All of this still needs to be solved in a modern system, but for the most part the hardware, firmware, and OS will sort things out by themselves—even if some of the details of that process are liable to give you nightmares[3,4]. The iMac, for its part, solved this by not having any expandability at all (ISA or PCI), so the settings could be burned into the firmware.
[1] See e.g. https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Plug-and-Play-HOWTO.html
[2] I don’t think this was ever a problem for address ranges for memory-mapped I/O, UMA issues excepted,—perhaps because MMIO didn’t really become popular until PCI won and ACPI appeared?
[3] https://wiki.osdev.org/I/O_APIC#IO_APIC_Inputs
[4] https://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=29558