Which one was it really?
How do you figure the iMac brought anything to the mainstream at that point in time? The market was 99.9% pc at that point. PC users made USB mainstream, the iMac just brought it to mac users.
Other than your 99.9% of the computers being pc which is a little high, your other statement that PC users made USB mainstream needs some more explaining. It is a given fact that USB was available on Windows PCs at least 2 years before USB was available on Macs. But that's as far as anything is really clear & positive.
I sold computers for a few years at this time. In fact I probably sold the first iBook in Omaha, NE. Even though Windows computers had USB ports on them they came with PS2 keyboards & mice. Not only that it was the rare Windows PC that would boot without a PS2 keyboard &/or PS2 mouse. It took most of that time to convince these Windows users not to purchase parallel printers & parallel scanners. The main sales of USB devices was to Mac users as the Mac would work with them while the Windows machines would not always. Even with all of the problems of connecting multiple parallel devices to one computer it was a very hard sell to replace them with USB devices.
Because of the much larger number of Windows computers it would be easy to give all of the credits for USB devices to Windows, but it really wasn't until the iMac started using USB devices that USB became popular enough for Windows users, (usually crowd followers), to go with USB. The Windows Geeks that used USB as soon as it was on Windows computers did not control what other Windows users used. Even though the Mac had much smaller numbers, it added to the Windows Geeks gave a big enough market for USB devices. And then the mainstream Windows users finally saw that even USB1 was easier to use than parallel & the older serial methods.
So even though it took years for USB to replace the keyboard & pointing device from the much older PS2 scheme of things, the large number of Window users made up for the limited use in the early years of USB.
To me it was the early Windows Geeks, followed on by the iMacs that lead to the USB expansion. Then slowly the rest of the Windows users were converted. As with most things on these forums both sides of a discussion have their correct points while they seem to still have some incorrect points.
