Arstechnica reported today that the iMac has turned 10.

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been 10 years.  My first Mac was a Mac Classic, which, surprisingly, lasted me through my freshman year of college… in 1998.  Printing reports was always fun with it - anything that involved superscripts or subscripts would cause the old LaserWriter attached to it to slow to a crawl.  This wasn’t much of a problem in high school, but it didn’t take long during college to discover that my chemistry and physics reports were taking anywhere between half an hour and an hour to print.  Seeing as they were in the 4-6 page range, and seeing as I had the rather nasty habit of doing the reports about half an hour to an hour before class, this was increasingly becoming a problem.  Even worse, I didn’t have a modem for the Mac, which meant that Internet access was completely out.  Of course, the university had a nice enough computer lab to keep me from being too disappointed about this, but it was still annoying.

Then, one day in 1999, my grandma surprised me with something - she bought me an iMac.  It was a Rev. D iMac, Bondi Blue in color, and it was a huge upgrade over what I had previously.  Finally, I had a computer that could get on the Internet!  Even better than that, it displayed things in color!  Even better than that, it could actually print out my reports in under five minutes!  This was a truly glorious machine, as far as my pitifully low standards were concerned.

Fast forward to 2005 - it was my senior year of college.  I took a couple of years off so I could properly learn the value of a college education (or, more accurately, properly learn the value of the job skills I had by that point - about $7.50/hour at Radio Shack), and, unfortunately, my finances were none the better for it.  So, I milked that iMac for everything it was worth.  By this point, I had upgraded the pitiful 6 GB hard drive with a much faster and much more spacious 80 GB hard drive.  I had also installed OS X on it (10.1), then upgraded it to 10.3.  I also had put in a RAM upgrade by this point - it had 160 MB of RAM instead of the 32 MB it originally came equipped with; this gave it just enough to run NeoOffice.  Being a computer science major, I certainly was not above using the UNIX underpinnings of the OS to compile and run my homework assignments.  To enable me to do my assembly programming homework at home, I had installed Bochs on it, which gave me just enough to compile the code into Intel-native machine code. My senior project, which involved a little physics simulator that a couple of guys in my class wrote and which they tasked me with the documentation of (a task which I didn’t approach with quite as much enthusiasm as I probably should have, in retrospect), still compiled somehow, and, yes, it did run… very, very slowly.  While most of my classmates and friends were playing with 2+ GHz machines, I was plodding along with my G3/333 MHz iMac, barely keeping pace.  By this point, Flash animations were becoming increasingly sophisticated; it didn’t take long for me to learn that my computer didn’t have the horsepower to deal with YouTube.

I didn’t get a better computer until 2006, when a customer of mine told me to dispose of a perfectly good machine… and dispose of it I did.  I still kept that iMac around for another year until it was replaced with a slightly newer iMac that another customer handed to me.  By this point, the ESO had begun to enforce a strict “one computer in, one computer out” policy to keep me from accumulating a large horde of computers, so, though that old iMac had a certain sentimental place in my heart, it was time for it to go.

That iMac, I am certain, is still running somewhere.  I gave it to the receptionist at my current employer, who, as I understand it, gave it to her brother.  Like so many Apple products I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with, it’s running far longer than anyone would ever want it to, which is the opposite effect I’ve seen from most other manufacturers.  Some day, I hope to get another Mac, once I’m flush enough to buy one.  Until then, I’ll always have fond memories of that old Bondi Blue iMac (”Bondi Blue” apparently being code for “teal”, by the way) and how it somehow got me through my seven year journey through college.

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