At the time, I hated using these things. Mac OS 9 would lock up unexpectedly (generally Windows wouldn’t blue screen while simply typing up a document whereas these iMacs would just freeze, requiring you to stick a paperclip into a hole like ejecting a CD drive manually). The keyboard was terrible, mouse was worse and the speakers were only good to play notification dings.
This author of the article has some real rose-tinted glasses.
MacOS was just about as jank as Windows 9x by my recollection.
The screen was nice, the USB support was nice. I didn’t hate the keyboard, though I was used to an IBM Model M so I hammered those keys…
It was such an iconic machine. Ironically, at the time I hated them. (I probably still wouldn’t want to use one even now, but now I only have to look at pictures of them, and they admittedly are nice to look at.)
I had a friend in high school whose family had one of these in their living room, and it was running OS 9. It was practically useless, but I forget what he did on it. I seem to remember that it ran World of Warcraft, but now I’m questioning my memory if that was really possible or not.
I like iMac’s colorful design. It really stood out from the beige-grey PC’s back then. My dream would be to build a sleeper PC inside the iMac.
His family also got the first iMac running OS X, and that was such a beauty to behold. I mean, maybe the design wasn’t as colorful or iconic as the G4 generation, but man that OS was sweet.
You could upgrade to OS X on the colorful ones, I installed 10.0 on release day and got an OS X tee shirt and wore it to school because what was I thinking. It was fun times. I remember having to open Emacs to make some system change to better support IRC in Ircle and I had no idea what I was doing but it was Unixy!
Did OS X even include emacs???
It did. I checked their opensource repo and it looks like they removed it in 10.15. The shell was also tcsh at the time and the terminal, I think, defaulted to black on white. Everything about it was unfamiliar to a Mac user, it felt like an old library Dynix system.
it looks like they removed it in 10.15
Things have really gone downhill