Once upon a time - iMac G3

Apple's original Bondi Blue iMac - boasting a massive 233MHz G3 processor. Photo / Supplied

I may have a hit a rather terrible title theme here, sorry, but recently I got an old iMac to make sure was cleared off of any important files before passing it on to...anyone who wanted it.

And I'd be surprised if anyone did, but it turned out to be quite a revelation.

The semi-transparent indigo-coloured, CRT-enclosing all-in-one happily still runs Apple OS 8.5. It has 96MB RAM, uses 97MB as virtual memory, loads up extensions as it boots, and makes creepy, cutesy noises every time you move, open or close something.

This is one of the very first generation of iMacs, and the first real indicator of the impact the return of Steve Jobs was going to have on Apple. It was announced in May 1998 and shipped in August.

It was Apple's computer for the new millennium, aimed at the consumer market and designed with the internet in mind (hence the 'i-', by the way - they were all fitted with internal 56Kpbs modems).

The iMac was positioned by Apple as the most original new computer since the original Mac in 1984, and that's pretty much how it was received. It almost immediately started to turn Apple's fortunes around.

When it was first shown to the public, Jobs talked about it to a still and silent room, at the Boston Macworld conference. He mentioned its connectivity - ethernet and USB were built in, too. The ethernet was for the growing education market, with US schools getting networking built in.

You can almost feel the scepticism mixed with expectation in the room. "We think iMac's going to be a really big deal." But he still hadn't shown what was under a cloth.

Jobs went on to compare it to other consumer PCs out there - they were slow, their displays were bad and too small, often networking was not built in, and the were 'ug-ly'! (He had that right - but Apple's range up to then was pretty beige and plain-looking, too.)

It's still largely the case - PC makers haven't learnt much.

Then the Apple CEO showed it: people started cheering, then applause and wolf whistles broke out. "The back of this thing looks better than the front of the other guys', by the way." (Jobs got that right, too.)

See it for yourself.

The translucent 'Bondi Blue' plastic look became widely emulated. Even staplers came out in semi-transparent, as well as hard drives and other accessories.

The iMac included a cutting edge G3 processor, two 12Mbps Universal Serial Ports (USB) were its only means of external expansion, and it came with a newly-designed USB keyboard and mouse. RAM was 32MB standard - considered high for the day, and expandable to 256MB. A 24x CD ROM was in a pop-out tray in the front.

While the iMac (take note, ill-informed doubters) had no other serial or SCSI ports, many manufacturers promised to make a variety of USB peripherals available by the time it shipped in August, and this promise was kept.

The iMac's mouse may have been the "coolest mouse on the planet", but to be fair it's also one of Apple's true all-time design disasters - the so-called 'hockey puck' mouse is round and looks fine, but a round mouse gets turned around in your hand and becomes a struggle to orient. Most people abandoned these for PC mice - handily, these were available in USB too, and the Macs could take pretty much any of them without drivers, as they still mostly do.

Apple went to a longitudinal mouse some time later, heedless for far too long to the wails of protest.

Steve Jobs resisted the two-button mouse and scroll wheel for years, the numerous Apple users deploying PC mice instead notwithstanding.

But support for the scrollwheel came pretty quickly, even if this support was not implemented in an Apple-branded mouse, and eventually Apple kinda relented: the buttons went in, but under the carapace so you couldn't see them. This led to the widely propagated myth that Apple mice only had one button years and years after all Apple mice had two, plus scroll - in fact, I still hear this.

So I reckon Jobs just hated the clunky buttons and knobs on the mouse itself rather than the implementation - a bit like iPods not having battery compartments because they're ugly and catch on things, and can break off.

The real surprise was the operating system. Apart from the fact I kept stroking the mouse for scrolling up and down - the system probably didn't support it, the mouse certainly not. But despite OS X sitting on NeXT/Unix, effectively, this old system, which harks back to the original Mac OS released in 1984, is remarkably similar to use. It looks very similar, and many of the commands are exactly the same. I found my way around it really quickly.

Apple kept building on the system before until OS X (which launched ten years ago exactly, March 25th 2001). OS X was a complete break. But the pioneering work Apple had been doing for decades was continued in the look and feel.

Now, I like getting new Macs, and I get used to new speeds pretty quickly, so sometimes a Mac just a couple of years older makes me impatient as I wait a few split seconds longer than I'm used to for something to open.

But this thing feels and operates in a surprisingly useful manner still, despite being 13 years old!

I used to have an orange one of these. I chose orange because ... it was the only colour they had when I went to buy it. Officially, it was called 'tangerine'; the plastic iMacs shipped in a colour range in 1999, with the other colours being strawberry, lime, grape and blueberry. Apple called them 'flavours', not colours, you see, but inside they were the same: 266 (later 333MHz) with a 66MHz system bus. You could choose a 4 or 6GB hard drive.

I was very pleasantly surprised by this old Mac.

It makes me want to get my PowerPC G4 Cube out of the shed ...

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com