FireWire first came out on the iMac? I know it wasn't on the first one. I had the bondi blue Rev. B. I know they had it on the later iMac DV models.
But I thought FireWire was first on one of the PowerBooks with the coffee-colored keyboards, but it's difficult to remember.
Not sure if I would describe the Internet as "nascent" when the iMac came out. Making it *easier* to get on the Internet was a marketing push of the iMac, but it was by no means new.
Weird tidbit I remember: The original iMac was supposed to at first only come out with only a 33.6k modem, but they changed it to 56k shortly before shipping.
And with the Rev B I had I believe the only change was a slightly increased amount of VRAM. It was a great computer.
Edit: Going down memory lane a bit more with little tidbits I remember:
The first time I saw an iMac was transcendent. It just looked so different and was so cool. I know by rote memory that it had a huge impact, but it's hard to remember it viscerally because now I kind of think: How could that have made such a huge impression? But it did. This was before Apple stores and it was in a local electronics shop.
The CD-ROM was very noisy --I think it was a 24x CD-ROM, and Apple shipped an update to address the noise that was just a software fix to make it run slower.
It came with Nanosaur, and some other games I don't remember as well.
I somehow got postcards from Apple that were to help advertise the iMac. It had pictures of the iMac with marketing slogans. One said Mental Floss, I recall.
I got the bondi Rev B iMac in 9th grade, and at the time I remember trying to explain to my teacher what it was, and she said, "You mean it's like a Dell?"
That year in my science class, we had to write a report on inventors, and I wrote one on Steve Jobs and included the iMac as one of his inventions. Wish I still had that report.
It was a pretty big deal to get a G3 Mac at that price. From memory, the other G3 Macs were not that much more powerful than the iMac. It was Apple's re-entry to the consumer market.
Everything became translucent with blue highlights like the iMac for a while, including the USB printer we bought to go with it. A lot of knock-off products.
I didn't do this, but I also vaguely recall that it could somehow play PlayStation games out of the box owing to the iMac and PlayStation using the same type of processor.
We ended up donating the bondi iMac to my cousins, shipping it cross country. Unfortunately for some reason they said it didn't work (not sure what was wrong or if it was user error) and they tried opening it up and it further broke . . .
www.macworld.com
