The iMac Turns Ten

I’ve said it a million times before, but I’ll say it again, “Time flies.”. Ten years ago, Apple released a new computer that really, really caught people off-guard. It was so different, and many people were undecided on whether to even like it or not. I personally didn’t, but I’m fussier than a wine-taster. What computer am I talking about? The iMac of course.

Ten-years-ago is when the first bulby-designed computer was released in numerous different colors, and as far as I know, it was the first to keep everything internal, except for the mouse and keyboard, of course. Whether or not you liked it though, it’s fun looking back, because technology today is in all regards 10x better.

The first iMac had a CRT screen, making the entire unit heavy, it featured a 233MHz PowerPC (G3) CPU, 32MB of RAM (whoa), 2MB of VRAM on the ATI Rage card, two USB ports (I believe the iMac was the first computer with USB ports, but I might be mistaken) and a staggering 4GB hard drive. How far we’ve come. Whether or not you like the iMac, it’s undoubtedly one of the most memorable computers in history.

Suddenly, the dying Apple was back in business, and in a big way. In addition to being all about the Internet, the iMac was the first consumer machine to go completely legacy-free: it offered only USB in an era when serial, parallel, and SCSI cables were still cluttering up desktops, and completely ditched the floppy drive long before the rest of the industry.