Micro Life (9) : Apple iMac

Working at a web design agency exposed me, for the first time, to Macintoshes. At first i thought they were rather aloof and strange with their big monitors and tendency to crash all the time but then i started to get used to the Apple way and found it was good. A friend showed me, on his 7200, how to stop thinking the Windows way and to think the Mac way with drag and drop and other amazing GUI thrills. I was hooked and it was time to buy my own Mac.

I did already have an old SE by then but i couldn't do much with that. The thing about Macs of course is that they are a bit more expensive than PCs and as i was probably only on about 14K at the time buying a new Mac, new monitor and all the other paraphernalia was a bit daunting. But then Apple introduced the iMac which was an all-in-one computer with monitor and networking already built in. So i bought one.

This was the original iMac of course, PowerPC equipped and running at a speedy 233Mhz. I think it ran Mac OS 8.1 out of the box though 8.5 came fairly quickly afterwards. For the next few years it gave me trouble free  computing, though was short of grunt for the move to OSX (i did experiment with OpenBSD at one stage) though did serve OK as a web server even if it took about an ice age to boot up.

I upgraded to a faster iMac in the early 2000s though i have kept this original iMac to the current day. It hasn't been turned on for a while though and is kept under my desk, so i end up accidentally kicking it several times a day.

The Micro-Life series will end at this point but to conclude this iMac was superseded by a 350Mhz dark blue iMac (which my ex-wife made off with), then i returned to the dark side for some reason and bought a Dell PC (which i still have) and finally a couple of years ago returned to the fold and bought my current Macbook. Over the last decade i have also bought or been given dozens of old Macs and other old computers, many i still have and you can see them here.

My current Macbook has a Dual Core processor running at 2.1GHz and 2GB of RAM, my first computer the ZX-80 has a Z80 processor running at 3.5MHz and 1KB of RAM. So there has been a bit of progress over the last 30 years.