"Now students, what did you do this summer on vacation? ...Uh, teacher, teacher! Call on me, call on me!
"OK, Davy. Just calm down, and tell us your story.
"Well, great. Here goes..."

Ever since Apple announced the iMac a few months ago, I've been keeping it on my radar screen, just on the periphery. I wasn't terribly impressed immediately, mainly because it's really just a desktop model with a couple of new features thrown in, some tossed out, and everything popped into a spiffy new case. It's not a new toy for kids, although it looks like one. And, while Apple may be marketing it as entry level, it's far from that. And, besides, I really wanted to upgrade my old Quadra 700, which has an old NewerTech PPC 601 accelerator in it, to one of Apple's new minitowers.

In fact, I actually did put a Build-to-Order (BTO) minitower on order back in July, only to cancel it the next day when I read about a potential problem with dim video on that model. And so I put my plans on hold, waiting to see what Apple was going to say about the dim video.

Then, just before vacation, my Significant Other suggested the iMac to me, and a flashbulb went off in my head. For $1300, I could get a new Mac that was actually fun to use again, while waiting to see where Apple was going with the configuration I really wanted. I've also been holding onto some games that simply wouldn't run on my hybrid Quadra/PPC (they required thousands of colors, and the Quadra only offered 256 or millions), and was getting antsy to play them before the next generation of stuff came out. So, I took a careful look at the specs and early reviews of the new model. I ordered one.

The Specifications...

The iMac is a 40 pound, 233MHz G3 desktop Mac with 32MB of RAM (upgradeable to at least 128MB); 2MB of video RAM (upgradeable to 6MB); a beautiful, razor sharp, 15" shadow mask monitor (640x480, 800x600 with up to millions of colors, and 1024x768 up to thousands of colors, with the built-in video RAM); a 4GB EIDE Quantum Fireball hard drive; a 56kbps Flex/V.90 Rockwell chip modem; 10/100Mbps Ethernet; 16-bit stereo out (two front mounted speakers, internal jack for speakers, two external jacks for headphones); one built-in microphone (which makes you sound as if you're on an aircraft; but, there's also an internal microphone jack to plug your own PlainTalk microphone into to get away from the iMac's internal fan noise); 4Mbps IrDA-compliant infrared port (for pointing your laptop with IrDA at the iMac and transferring data; and yes, it does recognize the Newton, even though there's no software available to put on the iMac to connect to it); a 24X CD-ROM drive (that works like laptop drives, in that it pops out when the button is pushed, rather than as most desktops with a powered tray); and something entirely new to the Mac, two Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports. More on this last in a moment. (Oh, and one more thing, while we're awaiting the stability of MacOS X, the infamous paperclip holes for those annoying times when you need to restart the machine, but nothing else seems to work, in the ports bay on the right side of the machine.)

The Look...

All this, in a translucent "bondi" blue and white case no bigger than an ordinary 17" monitor. And yes, you can even see the insides of the wires, the keyboard, and the mouse. All in all, it's an irrestible configuration and look for anyone intimidated by all the usual stuff one has to go through to setup a computer, and it IS good looking. I could envision one of these in every upscale hotel room in America (locked down of course!), and it would look great in anyone's bedroom or apartment. Mine's currently sitting on my dining room table until I get my computer room organized.

Click on Me!

The History...

You know, in addition to the rational side of the human equation, there's the emotional side. Back in the late '70's, I purchased my first computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I (which I still own...too expensive to throw away! Is there any museum out there looking for a mint condition donation?). This was a purely emotional decision. I've always loved technology, and the idea of setting up a machine to do things for me, and the TRS-80 suggested the possibility of starting to be able to do some of this. I was also/remain an avid Star Trek fan, so intelligent machines also appealed to this side of my personality. However, the reality was far different. That machine used a cassette tape to load the operating system (usually taking two or three tries), had 8K of standard memory (I added the 32K upgrade module), and ran at 1Mhz using a Z80 CPU. The only software available was the BASIC programming language that came with it so that you could write your own programs. Oh, and some enterprising hackers had written an early Star Trek game for it.

I decided to try my hand at learning BASIC, and spent a month writing a sort routine...only to find afterward that BASIC included a sort function of its own. I DID get to spend a month thinking through logically how to perform this function, however, and my routine did work, just not as well. In any case, while I had to admit that that had been fun, I also realized there were other things in my life that I wanted to participate in. Programming was too time consuming. So, $3,800 poorer, I eventually covered it up with a sheet, and waited for a more user friendly computer to come along.

It wasn't until the introduction of the Macintosh in January 1984 that I felt that itch again. Quite aside from the rational side of it...typing letters, or whatever...it was cute! It was graphical. I knew immediately that here was a machine that I could begin to use at once, not sometime in the distant future when/if I decided to pursue a Computer Science degree. It was a machine that I could grow with, and enjoy at the same time. And, at $2,500 it had 128K of memory, and ran at 8Mhz(!), astronomically faster and more powerful than my old TRS-80, and it had a completely new, compact storage device than held 400,000 characters of information (over 200 pages of text!), Sony's new hard shelled, floppy disk drive. I had to have it, and purchased one as soon as I could.

In the interim, I've owned (still own, and they still work!) several Macintoshes. Quite aside from the occasional glitches, they've always been reliable, dependable machines. Only once in 14 years have I ever had a hardware failure (a power supply). My problems have always been on the software side. And, even then, I was always able to delete, and reinstall the offending software, or logically narrow down and delete the conflicting extension, or whatever. In short, I didn't need to be a technical wizard to keep it working. And that, is the point.

And why I have this emotional attachment to the Mac. It's fun to use, and... it just works...

Which brings me back to the present. Not since 1984 have I felt this way about a new computer. Somewhere along the way I bought into the bean counter's rational mentality, as did Apple. Their machines became increasingly powerful, but boring, and less obviously different from other computers. Fortunately, Microsoft bought into the Mac mentality, and attempted to turn the MS-DOS computer into an easy to use graphical environment. They got it partly right. It's graphical. But, MS-DOS brings along so much tedious baggage, it's essentially impossible to give Windows the elegance of the MacOS, without throwing away all that backward MS-DOS compatibility.

Also along the way, I became a computer professional, and I must share...there are problems that crop up in Windows that are virtually impossible to correct in any easy way. At those times, you either reformat your hard drive and restore from the last working backup (You do backup, don't you?), or reformat and reinstall your operating system and applications, and data files (You do save your data files somewhere else, don't you?), or you haul your computer off to some computer service center and pay them $50-$100 an hour to do the same thing for you.

The Experience...

So, it's August 1998. My five year old Mac is on its last legs (OK, it's old, not broken), but I've had no economic reason to replace it. Its components have been upgraded several times, and it's still quite peppy, by 1993 standards. I'm patiently waiting around for the new generation of Mac technologies to settle down, so I can get a machine that'll satisfy me another five years. And along comes the iMac onto my radar screen.

On the rational side, the iMac is just a desktop Mac, in a new case, using the new Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard for connecting stuff to. Not particularly special. So, why's it feel so special? There's that emotional component again.

The iMac instills in me the same emotional reaction that the original Mac did, with a few new wrinkles. It's cute and distinctive again, true. It's taking bold new steps again (the Sony floppy in 1984, USB in 1998). It's astronomically faster and more powerful than my original Mac (by ANY standard), and substantially faster and more powerful than any comparably priced Windows PC today (in user responsiveness, not mere clock cycles). And, I'm actually beginning to believe that Apple may have a future again, not as an also ran computer company, but as an innovative, consumer driven company.

So, I'm sitting in my resort hotel room up at Lake Tahoe as Saturday the 15th approaches. My palms are beginning to sweat. I break down and give the large electronics store in Sacramento I pre-ordered the iMac from a call, just to see if they know anything about the anticipated deliveries on Saturday. I won't be back in Sacramento until Sunday, and I want to assure they'll hold my pre-ordered iMac, since I don't expect the first shipments to last until Sunday. They say they won't. First come, first served. I'm annoyed, to put it mildly. So, I also call my small local Stockton Mac retailer to see if he knows anything about his shipment. He's ordered 10, but has no commitment on delivery. I'm beginning to panic... Then, I remember...

The previous day we were up in Reno sightseeing, and we passed a big CompUSA store! I remembered where it was! So, we called and pre-ordered an iMac from them. Not willing to take a chance on their not honoring the order, we decide to get up early on Saturday and drive to Reno.

We arrived about an hour before store opening. We're alone in the parking lot. Thank goodness! Reno's not the computer mecca that I'm used to. There's a chance... At 9:00 am, I rush through the doors to the pre-order counter. I'm first! I'm in their computer! Hooray! Out comes the plastic, and I calm down a bit. After paying for the iMac, and jawboning with a couple of salespeople at the counter, they agree to give me one of their iMac T-shirts! Now, deal complete, I can casually saunter over to the Apple Store-within-a-Store area to actually see the computer I've just purchased. What bliss! (Just a touch of hyperbole!)

When we got it back to the hotel, I pulled it out of the box, plugged in the power cord, plugged in the modem, turned it on, just like the commercial. I took a couple of minutes to enter the Lake Tahoe Internet access number and stuff for Inreach, pressed the Connect button, and... connected. Not quite the eight minutes of the commercial, but an easy 10 minutes.

This is one sweet machine. I've been using a 250Mhz G3 accelerated PowerMac 8500 at work for several months, alongside my Wintel 133Mhz Pentium PC, and this felt peppier than either. Internet pages fairly popped up on the screen. The screen was beautiful. I spent the rest of the day/evening surfing the web. Packing up the next morning was literally just unplugging the iMac, putting it back in the box, and hauling it down to the car. Once I got home, I unboxed it again, set it on the dining table, plugged it in again, five minutes flat.

Who'll want this machine? Of course, all the current consumer Mac users with older machines looking to upgrade. And, students with connections to the Internet and campus networks. And, parents who want to give their kids an entry to the computer world, but don't want to have it consume all their time. And, first time users who want a computer, but not the hassles. And, of course, those current PC owners who are sick to death of their current machines (ComputerWare announced this week that 13% of their iMac sales were to current Wintel PC owners switching to Mac, with an additional 15% being brand new computer users. Not bad!).

Who's this computer NOT for? Power users with lots of investments in SCSI peripherals, or who need a larger monitor, or who need expansion slots. So, why'd I get one? To hold me over until the next generation tower machines are expected next spring, oh, and yes, to perhaps play a few games...

The Caveats...

The iMac is a treat, but it's also not perfect. Oh, virtually everything works as expected. But, it's also a bit cutting edge, with a few rough edges. Here are the ones I've discovered over the past week: