I was working at a large university at the time and was so anxious and thrilled when the management got me one of the first of these for my office. It looked so amazing compared to anything we'd had before. The lack of a floppy drive was so weird at the time but we got over it and floppies were gone so fast after that with the increasing storage memory/archival needs. It seems like a blip in time now, and I can barely remember even having the computer for very long, as things progressed so fast.
I bought a 1st generation iMac when the 2nd generation released and the 1st dropped in price. At the same time I ordered a couple of pieces of software. When they arrived I found out that one came on floppies. Luckily I was running a Linux server and Linux had compatibility with both the HFS file system and AppleTalk networking. I mounted the floppy on the Linux server, configured the AppleTalk server to share the floppy and started it up, went over to the iMac and mounted the floppy remotely and installed the software,
i had that at high school, literally the worst pc ever, makes thes compaq presario 5000 looks like a rocket beside of it, very few morrons bought these things outside of cheap buisnesses
The iMac was so cool as a kid for me, I've always preferred Windows machines but there was something about using these in the computer lab at school that was really exciting. I love that stylized aesthetic so much, and I miss that transparent plastic. As sinful as it would be, I would love to gut one and build a sleeper PC inside.
Heck, there were a few similarly-styled PCs that came out the year or two after the iMac, like the eMachines eOne. Though Apple soon sued them off the market for ripping off the iMac's design language a little _too_ blatantly. 🙂
I've got so much nostalgia for these iMac designs. They were so prevalent in my pre-teen to teen years due to most of my schools having these in the computer labs. Just seeing that keyboard and mouse combo at the beginning of the video brought back so many memories.
I have a weird nostalgia for the beige box era of computers... especially the way the beige would slowly but surely turn to yellow (and sometimes get inexplicably sticky). So inelegant it looped around to being iconic.
And Apple was hardly the only computer company thinking outside the beige box by the late '90s. NeXT's computers had been black since the first 1990 NeXTCube, after all. IBM's ThinkPad laptops were black right from their introduction in 1992, which led to most other laptop manufacturers going black or dark gray by the mid '90s. A few companies were also making black or dark gray desktop PCs by the mid '90s. (My ex-stepmom had a cool-looking, curvy black Toshiba desktop in 1996, for example.) Various "internet appliance" companies also tried unconventional styles and colors for their own low-budget internet computers. And some UNIX workstations came in _very_ striking colors, like SGI's deep-purple Indigo, cyan Indy and Octane, and dark blue O2. Still, by the mid 2000s, the shift was complete. PCs had mostly gone from beige to black/dark gray. And the iMac and iBook had gone from translucent and candy-colored to white -- and the PowerBook had gone metallic instead, soon dragging laptops in general to metallic colors.
The last computer I built, I searched for a month for an beige style computer tower. All I wanted was the most unflashy thing possible. No disco lights, no frills, no fun. I could not find one. If you want that, you have to buy a Dell and they're all black.
11:10 "just plug in Ethernet" uhhh that's not how dial up works Also as someone who worked in the PC industry at the time, by the time iMacs came out, every single Windows computer came with a modem unless you custom built one without. And of course sign-ups for some of the most popular dial-up services.
Heck, didn’t the very first iMac not even have ethernet? (Maybe I’m misremembering “only” having 10BASET) Either way, that being the default option (even after mentioning modems) does date him 😅
Yeah, came here to say this. Even the most bobo Packard Bell-tier PCs were coming with modems well before the iMac released. And to my recollection, Ethernet was still very much limited to commercial uses. I don't remember seeing a consumer product with Ethernet until around 2000.
Yep, I like this channel but I'm guessing he was born around this time. I was his age in the late 90s, every PC came with a modem, and Ethernet was always the optional addon. RJ-11 and RJ-45 look similar so that's why he's confused. Gosh kids today may have never seen a telephone cord come to think.
@@chozar haha yep. I remember adding ethernet to my hand-me-down Pentium 3 in 2005! It didn’t have enough RAM so the extra network stack bogged it down haha.
Man, i remember as a poor kid seeing other people with iMacs. They were such beautiful computers and it pushed me to learn more and more about tech. Sadly, now as an adult Apple don't make awe inspiring computers anymore.
Harder to be awe-inspired as an adult. I bet a lot of kids feel similarly about the colorful current iMacs. (No it’s not quite the same, but somewhat similar… nostalgia won’t be quite the same for them, but any kids prone to nostalgia will certainly look back on current Apple products with fondness… it’s just that tech hasn’t radically changed as fast as going from CRT to LCD… whole different vibe.) Anyway…
Apple are secretly pretty boring. All Steve jobs jobs did when he came back in the late 90's was put a new coat of paint on a software ecosystem and launched a new OS with 'user experience' at the forefront and Apple have always valued design, as a company dealing in premium custom products. The zombie Apple where they lost money still made stylish machines. The language was just really dated. But Apple software engineers are the real backbone of the company and I hope the new manager remembers that Tim Cook.
One clarification: This talked about the variety of colors of iMacs, but that wasn’t until the second generation. The first generation was only available in one color. To paraphrase Henry Ford - you could get it in any color you wanted as long as that was Bondi Blue.
One of the things never talked about that saved Apple was eliminating the incompatibilities between Macs and PCs. Nowadays, you can connect the same keyboards and mice to Macs and PCs, you can take files created on PCs and read them on Macs. That wasn't possible for a looooooong time. With the prevalence of the internet and the online transfer of files, this was a necessity.
My grade school had a fleet of iMac G3s in service until around 2010 when they sold them quite cheaply. I bought one and actually it's still across the room from me lol.
Are you gonna modify it? I’ve been thinking of picking one up and doing some cool things with it. My aunty had one in her office, I’ll never forget it!!
You have an important mistake at 5:07: at that time (1985), Jobs wasn't Apple's CEO, he was Apple's Chairman. The CEO (and President) was John Sculley.
The biggest genius of Apple's iMac was essentially one-upping the current MPC (multimedia PC) offerings that ran Windows. Essentially, the practical goal was to sell a media machine first and foremost - one that you could watch a movie, play a game or listen to music on, with many of the trappings of a television set - with the skeleton of a device that at the time was more closely associated with clerical and intellectual work. Saying you're spending time on the computer just sounds more respectable to a lot of people than saying you're watching TV. And everything about the iMac's design screamed late-90s all-in-one TV (without the tuner or DVD drive)... except it was obviously a computer. It was a psychological trojan horse of sorts.
You missed that Microsoft also recommitted to developing Office for Mac. The multi colored iMacs weren’t offered at first either it was just the bondi blue. NeXT was struggling also when Apple purchased them. They weren’t very successful and their OS never got the attention it deserved.
It's also worth noting that the original mac was an absolute piece of shit that was born out of Steve Jobs' ego. The mac didn't have any cooling fans, so the chips kept popping out and the official way to resolve this was to pick it up and drop it on your desk. It was also intended to be the budget model, but that wasn't what Jobs wanted so it got awkwardly frankensteined into being their flagship product - killing off a much more capable computer with a much more justifiable price point. The result was a heavy, unreliable and slow computer that had a reputation for being a complete waste of money, all because Steve Jobs didn't want to step aside and let someone who actually understood how to design and build computers get credit for the success of the business, as opposed to a malignant narcissist with little to no actual knowledge of the industry besides being an exceptionally effective salesman.
@@casanovafunkenstein5090 Okay but you can't deny that the Performas of the 90s or systems like the PowerBook 5300 line wasn't worse, or before that in the late 80s when Apple made nothing but ungodly expensive Macintosh II series machines, one of which was sold for around $10k.
- netscape *was* free unless you were a business - every computer worked like that at the time because built in modems were standard that wasn't new or groundbreaking - dial-up didn't work like that - apple reduced their lines to 4 computers, not 2. - the imac came with multiple Web browsers and let you choose the default - you didn't show the Hockey Puck mouse, which was Ive and Jobs favourite feature and everyone hated it. - Next was bought because Copland was dead and apple needed an OS. They very nearly went with BEOS instead. Not because of stagnating lines. - no mention of the clones that actually were killing apple - again overstatement of the mac, its importance or how "groundbreaking" it was. Idk 5/10 maybe?
I noticed about half of these things without looking. This really was a poorly researched video. No mention of the molar Mac that apple was already developing either.
my elementary school computer lab had about 20 or so normal, boring pcs, and two of these colorful, fun, futuristic imacs. i don't remember if i ever actually got to use one, but i so wanted to because they looked so futuristic in the late 90s/early 2000s!
I remember when these dropped, my elementary school IMMEDIATELY got them. They came with a fun 3D Dinosaur game that I played whenever I got the chance to go to the computer lab. Good times ❤
God I would do anything to get my hands on an iMac G3, I taught myself how to use a computer on one of those when I was 2 and the nostalgia is so real!
I remember looking at these computers and wanting one so bad. As a kid i LOVED taking apart electronics so i can see whats inside it and the semi clear iMac was SO COOL to me.
I didn't see mentioned the thing that I believe made the most impact on the home computer market: forced adoption of USB. Before the iMac, there were special ports for keyboard/mouse, serial (including external modems and PDAs), printers (though also used by scanners and zip drives), and to a lesser extent external hard drives. USB had the potential to replace them all, but in the wintel world it was introduced as just yet another port to confuse people. The iMac got rid of those ports, for better or worse, in favor of attaching nearly everything by USB. And hardware manufacturers were dragged kicking and screaming into creating or adapting their hardware to work with USB in order to reach the Macintosh market, which also provided more incentive to support PC/Windows USB.
These still look like the coolest thing in the world. If I didn't use a Wacom for my work, I would love to just have one of these as a personal computer, just t'have
I remember vividly in grade 2 the first time I saw these in the computer lab. It was AMAZING! It was like being beamed into the future going from the old and ugly beige computers with big clunky keyboards to these colourful translucent computers with thin and minimalist keyboards. And then there was OS X which was like nothing I'd seen before. Going from Windows which was still very grey and square, to OS X which was colourful, with rounded graphics was simply breathtaking. Although I do remember that first version of OS X crashing or freezing a lot lol. The spinning beachball of death!
I dont have a G3, unfortunately, but I did manage to get myself an Imac G4 in recent years and I love it. Its not colourful like this one, but its very futuristic. With a thin screen that rotates ontop of a heavy base with the computer inside. It came with a keyboard, mouse and speekers. It works and was only 40 quid!
I remember when these came out and my I.T. colleagues and I just scoffed at them. “Meh, it’s a Mac. No one cares what color their computers is. How dumb.” Of course, the public proofed us wrong.
iMac G3s were very influential for Apple as a turning point with Job’s return. Before G3s, Apple’s direction was simply following back on what they know massively produce it while barely change anything. Post G3s, stick to what works and improve upon it for the horizon ahead while making radical changes.
I was around in 1994 and I can tell you this: Apple started tanking after Steve Wozniak left the Chairboard in 1986. Jobs was more the "Face" of the Company, but Wozniak was the Brains and the one Running things. Jobs and Wozniak were more like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis Meyer. When Jobs left in 1985, it was considered a slipup by Apple, but shortly after launching the 16-bit Apple IIGS in October 1986 to take on the Commodore Amiga, Wozniak left the company, so without Both Steves, Apple became directionless and although The Macintosh Pizza Box LC lines hit in 1989-1991, Apple quickly saw its Marketshare crumble in the fact of even MORE competition like Packard Bell and HP as well as NEWCOMERS Compaq and Gateway. The thing that ALMOST killed Apple Computer entirely was the Apple Newton PDA in 1993. This Revolutionary quite ahead of its time PDA Device was released TOO early to the market and was completely underpowered,improperly tested, Expensive and had Buggy and Unfinished Software.(Watch OddityArchive's Video on it) Apple lost almost $1 billion from it and Launched the Successful Quadra Mac line in early 1994. Quadra actually HELPED Clot Bleeding of Apple, but the Newton was such an unmitigated DISASTER that it caused Apple to be hit with a $4 Billion Deficit that had continued to climb. When Windows 95 and the Internet Craze Struck in 1995, Apple immediately realized that they were about to be left in the Dust, and were WISE enough to realize that they needed to make some compromises, buying NeXT was their way of getting Steve Jobs back, and their way of Inticiting Wozniak to return, licensing Microsoft's Internet Explorer was Logical Common Sense. Netscape was HORRIBLE. Buggy,Slow, Janky and often riddled with unfixed firmware. Gates and Apple were going to have to put aside their differences and work together if Apple were to survive. The iMac was created in 1996 with the return of Jobs and with Wozniak NOW Heading R&D. It was introduced in late 1997 exactly 11 years after IIGS(IIGS had been incorporated into the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom in 1988-1989). By 1999, Apple was NO longer bleeding Money.
@@RebZoomer I mean they don’t; compared to the ridiculous amount of products they produced in the 1980s-1990s. They were all just rehashes of the Macintosh.
Basically cut down all the insane amount of product variants they were putting out to just two, one desktop and laptop each in consumer and pro versions. The real genius move was simplifying their product line like that.
I literally just tracked down and bought two of these to restore, and was wondering when NationSquid would do a video on the iMac G3. Somehow less than 24hrs later it gets released
I learned how to use the word processor on a macintosh in late elementary school I think. and I'm grateful for that because the Microsoft Word I think it was I ended up working close enough to the same way.
I hope technology with this futuristic transparent style like the Imac comes back, it genuinely looks so much more refreshing than the dull minimalistic designs we have nowadays for computers.
Our school had both styles at the same time and they didn't realize why some in the class were not in the same spot in the lesson because they were a hundred times faster lmao 🤣 floppys were fun the Oregon trail enough said
Im pretty sure i read somewhere that Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web on a NeXT computer. He also made comments on how easy it was to operate and how much he liked the machine. That's a pretty cool achievement for NeXT
I remember my elementary school had two iMacs in the art room, but we were forbidden from going anywhere near them... I wonder what they were ever there for??
The middle school I attended in 1999 had just bought a whole bunch of these that fall. I thought they looked really cool, but hated MacOS. When I switched schools 2 years later, in a neighboring district, I was elated to discover they were using Windows 98 and had Netscape.
The only problem with the PowerPC macs (G3 etc) was that they always had half the amount of ram the OS required to run without swap filing an old IDE magnetic HDD disc for about 3 minutes before anything happened. Slowing down productivity in educational environments maybe to this day. My memories of these lovely macs is waiting long periods of time. Coming from a graphic design background. They _felt_ nice to work on but they were too slow because they were painful to use _unless_ you doubled the ram from the standard 8/16MB.
Honestly. 8GB is enough for general purpose use. If you are using Adobe or pro audio it wouldn't be enough.@@Paul_Maynard But back then you couldn't open an email without staring at the pinwheel for a few minutes.
Wait, So the whole reason why G5's from my primary school run like shit was a lack of memory? Thinking about it now it have sense. And those guys still are allergic to giving decent amounts of RAM
@@krazownik3139 It's worse if your using Photoshop. Well, almost impossible. I worked at two studios that put me on a 15 year old mac with not enough ram. Real actual working professional businesses, in the field of desktop publishing and don't understand about memory! I'm bending over backwards for insanely trivial constant changes and making the 15th revision of a newsletter no-one will eve read. Pdf's could take so long to render,
Your numbers are off. I worked at Apple dealers during this era, and sold lots of these systems. The iMac (and Power Mac G3) started at 32MB of RAM. IMHO, 64MB was a more realistic base amount, but I typically recommended to my customers to just add another 128MB module since it didn’t cost that much (when using quality third-party RAM; Apple’s RAM prices were absurd). You have to go back two more generations to find any systems with 8MB base memory. I do, however, agree with the general sentiment that Apple back then sold systems with far too little base RAM, a practice they continued for a long time. I think today’s base RAM is more realistic, insofar as there are real technical reasons why Macs need less RAM than Windows for many things. For ordinary basic computer use, it’s enough. (Not to mention that swapping to an SSD is not nearly the nightmare that swapping to HDD was!) I still always tell people to buy RAM generously, though!!!
3:10 nah man when i was a kid, I LEARNED HTML and CSS by my BARE HANDS and made my OWN website with my OWN CODE. It's been 5 years since my first website..
Please, when you record b-roll of windows, do install graphics drivers beforehand. It's awful to look at that 16-color vga picture and it does not represent the daily usage of windows. 11:07 not ethernet but phone line.
hi squiddy, I love your content 🩷 just curious, are you interested in lost media at all? would you ever make a video on something like Everyone Knows That or another lost song? I'd love to hear your take on it!!
The problem with the original Mac was the fact that computers were still too slow to offer extraneous features, like the GUI, that will limit the max RAM for the software you really wanted to run. Combined with the IBM blunder with the allowed creation of the IBM PC Compatible. Made MSDOS based apps popular. Allowing Windows 95, which came out as computers are consistently over 25mhz, with 32bit CPU, and over 16 megabytes of RAM. Plus it supported the existing MSDOS apps, and for less than OS/2 Warp. The Apple i series and Power series. Help get Apple out of their rut, long enough for the iPod and iPhone, that would accelerate the company.
Every Mac for many years had included the necessary drivers. (Many models had modems, either standard or optional, and external modems were common, too.) The iMac included a few more pre-configured configurations and setup wizards for more ISPs. Not surprising, given that the “i” in iMac stands for “internet”.
I needed a computer at the time and having to learn the intricies PC made it daunting to me but luckily also at the time i was using Macs quite alot = i purchase my first iMac G4, my biggest regret 2 weeks later they release the iMac DV which had a DVD player in the machine.... also Macs pretty much had NO games so no more late night ganes & procrastinating studies.
For home users, yes, absolutely. But in businesses and schools, Ethernet was already very common. Apple was acutely aware of this, which is why the first iMac was equipped with a then-luxurious 10/100Mbps Ethernet port, not the 10Mbps Ethernet that was common at the time. In 1999, Apple would release the AirPort Base Station, which in addition to being a WiFi router, was also a dialup-to-Ethernet router. (I.e. your internet connection could be either dialup or Ethernet, and it would share those with your entire WiFi and Ethernet network. For many people, this was their first home network.)
Not only did Apple have an innovative design but they also had more control over the hardware. At this time, Microsoft was easing into plug-and-play, which was more of a minefield. The USB port was also just introduced.
Steve Jobs really knew how to market products to the US. Where I am from in central EU I have never seen an iMac being used and I knew nobody who owned one. I did own an iPod, however, since an mp3 player was a natural evolution from my MiniDisc player.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple he somehow knew that Apple would do better as a "lifestyle" brand as opposed to a tech brand. And that is how Apple is still viewed today: most people buy Apple products to flex their wealth (some do use Apple products because they genuinely like and extensively use the features of those products but they are outnumbered by the people who just buy them as a status symbol). And this is a very US-specific issue where everyone is more concerned with looking rich and successful rather than actually being successful. It's why Japanese car companies made separate luxury divisions in the US with completely different names to sell luxury cars there as the average American considers Japanese cars to be cars for the working class, not cars for the rich.
IBook and IMac G3 where a short of "Art Nouveau" rinnovation for the design of computers (the clamshell IBook was like an hybrid for me from that art of 1890's and Y2K sensations of 1990's 😅) and Jonathan Ive was a short of early Peter Barhens before the "less is more" approach
Last iMac i liked. We have a newer mac and they ruined it when they quit making it compatible with a lot of games. It is not a gaming machine anymore. When we had them in school you could run anything game or program on them you wanted. Now I will stick with windows least I cant still run multiple games on windows.
I want to go back in time and be apart of the meeting where apple was discussing what this new 'iMac' was going to look like , and give Steve Jobs a handshake.
Hehe Netscape. I had a copy of it built into this old acer laptop I had. It was to open instruction/ help files that were stored on the computer in html. I was pretty sure netscape was dead before the computer was built so I thought it was nifty.
Head to www.squarespace.com/NationSquid
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No thx
you've really been pumping out videos recently, and I totally I appreciate that, but I hope that's not taking a toll on you.
Sellout
@@jonahplayscellojust let him get his bag
i mean in his defense he needs to keep the lights on@@jonahplayscello
I was working at a large university at the time and was so anxious and thrilled when the management got me one of the first of these for my office. It looked so amazing compared to anything we'd had before. The lack of a floppy drive was so weird at the time but we got over it and floppies were gone so fast after that with the increasing storage memory/archival needs. It seems like a blip in time now, and I can barely remember even having the computer for very long, as things progressed so fast.
In a way it was a blip, these things were obsolete almost immediately. Definitely iconic though.
I bought a 1st generation iMac when the 2nd generation released and the 1st dropped in price. At the same time I ordered a couple of pieces of software. When they arrived I found out that one came on floppies. Luckily I was running a Linux server and Linux had compatibility with both the HFS file system and AppleTalk networking. I mounted the floppy on the Linux server, configured the AppleTalk server to share the floppy and started it up, went over to the iMac and mounted the floppy remotely and installed the software,
i had that at high school, literally the worst pc ever, makes thes compaq presario 5000 looks like a rocket beside of it, very few morrons bought these things outside of cheap buisnesses
@@retrocompaq5212 this dude beefing over a 25 year old computer comparison
@@retrocompaq5212alright "retrocompaq5212"
The iMac was so cool as a kid for me, I've always preferred Windows machines but there was something about using these in the computer lab at school that was really exciting. I love that stylized aesthetic so much, and I miss that transparent plastic. As sinful as it would be, I would love to gut one and build a sleeper PC inside.
Heck people build cat beds and fish tanks in there, I think gutting it and making it a PC is a fine idea, if not absolutely diabolical :) Go for it!
@@LindseyLouWhoI have seen people put a raspberry pi computer in there too
Heck, there were a few similarly-styled PCs that came out the year or two after the iMac, like the eMachines eOne. Though Apple soon sued them off the market for ripping off the iMac's design language a little _too_ blatantly. 🙂
make it a gaming PC lol
Same.
Only issue is the board shape all wonky.
I've got so much nostalgia for these iMac designs. They were so prevalent in my pre-teen to teen years due to most of my schools having these in the computer labs. Just seeing that keyboard and mouse combo at the beginning of the video brought back so many memories.
Even today, the iMac looks absolutely beautiful
WAKE UP NATIONSQUID JUST POSTED 🗣️
! was awake 5 minutes before... my squiddy senses were tingling
I just woke up for 1 day and then suddenly this video happened
I have a weird nostalgia for the beige box era of computers... especially the way the beige would slowly but surely turn to yellow (and sometimes get inexplicably sticky). So inelegant it looped around to being iconic.
And Apple was hardly the only computer company thinking outside the beige box by the late '90s. NeXT's computers had been black since the first 1990 NeXTCube, after all. IBM's ThinkPad laptops were black right from their introduction in 1992, which led to most other laptop manufacturers going black or dark gray by the mid '90s. A few companies were also making black or dark gray desktop PCs by the mid '90s. (My ex-stepmom had a cool-looking, curvy black Toshiba desktop in 1996, for example.) Various "internet appliance" companies also tried unconventional styles and colors for their own low-budget internet computers. And some UNIX workstations came in _very_ striking colors, like SGI's deep-purple Indigo, cyan Indy and Octane, and dark blue O2.
Still, by the mid 2000s, the shift was complete. PCs had mostly gone from beige to black/dark gray. And the iMac and iBook had gone from translucent and candy-colored to white -- and the PowerBook had gone metallic instead, soon dragging laptops in general to metallic colors.
The last computer I built, I searched for a month for an beige style computer tower. All I wanted was the most unflashy thing possible. No disco lights, no frills, no fun. I could not find one. If you want that, you have to buy a Dell and they're all black.
I'm so mad you didn't say the popularity of the floppy "flopped"
11:10 "just plug in Ethernet" uhhh that's not how dial up works
Also as someone who worked in the PC industry at the time, by the time iMacs came out, every single Windows computer came with a modem unless you custom built one without. And of course sign-ups for some of the most popular dial-up services.
Heck, didn’t the very first iMac not even have ethernet? (Maybe I’m misremembering “only” having 10BASET)
Either way, that being the default option (even after mentioning modems) does date him 😅
Yeah, came here to say this. Even the most bobo Packard Bell-tier PCs were coming with modems well before the iMac released. And to my recollection, Ethernet was still very much limited to commercial uses. I don't remember seeing a consumer product with Ethernet until around 2000.
Yep, I like this channel but I'm guessing he was born around this time. I was his age in the late 90s, every PC came with a modem, and Ethernet was always the optional addon. RJ-11 and RJ-45 look similar so that's why he's confused. Gosh kids today may have never seen a telephone cord come to think.
The early models didn't but the later models did come with Ethernet from what I remember.
@@chozar haha yep. I remember adding ethernet to my hand-me-down Pentium 3 in 2005! It didn’t have enough RAM so the extra network stack bogged it down haha.
Man, i remember as a poor kid seeing other people with iMacs. They were such beautiful computers and it pushed me to learn more and more about tech. Sadly, now as an adult Apple don't make awe inspiring computers anymore.
Harder to be awe-inspired as an adult. I bet a lot of kids feel similarly about the colorful current iMacs. (No it’s not quite the same, but somewhat similar… nostalgia won’t be quite the same for them, but any kids prone to nostalgia will certainly look back on current Apple products with fondness… it’s just that tech hasn’t radically changed as fast as going from CRT to LCD… whole different vibe.)
Anyway…
Still the only mass market premium computer on the market though.
Apple are secretly pretty boring. All Steve jobs jobs did when he came back in the late 90's was put a new coat of paint on a software ecosystem and launched a new OS with 'user experience' at the forefront and Apple have always valued design, as a company dealing in premium custom products.
The zombie Apple where they lost money still made stylish machines. The language was just really dated.
But Apple software engineers are the real backbone of the company and I hope the new manager remembers that Tim Cook.
One clarification: This talked about the variety of colors of iMacs, but that wasn’t until the second generation. The first generation was only available in one color. To paraphrase Henry Ford - you could get it in any color you wanted as long as that was Bondi Blue.
which was the best color anyway
One of the things never talked about that saved Apple was eliminating the incompatibilities between Macs and PCs. Nowadays, you can connect the same keyboards and mice to Macs and PCs, you can take files created on PCs and read them on Macs. That wasn't possible for a looooooong time. With the prevalence of the internet and the online transfer of files, this was a necessity.
Ironically I just got an iMac today (graphite 400mhz) today for $30 and it works!
Nice! I would think it would be a collectors product now and instead cost a lot more.
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My grade school had a fleet of iMac G3s in service until around 2010 when they sold them quite cheaply. I bought one and actually it's still across the room from me lol.
Are you gonna modify it? I’ve been thinking of picking one up and doing some cool things with it. My aunty had one in her office, I’ll never forget it!!
two vids in a week, nice
i miss when tech looked all round, bubbly and semitransparent
The style is called frutiger aero there’s some good vids on it on RUclips
You have an important mistake at 5:07: at that time (1985), Jobs wasn't Apple's CEO, he was Apple's Chairman. The CEO (and President) was John Sculley.
The biggest genius of Apple's iMac was essentially one-upping the current MPC (multimedia PC) offerings that ran Windows. Essentially, the practical goal was to sell a media machine first and foremost - one that you could watch a movie, play a game or listen to music on, with many of the trappings of a television set - with the skeleton of a device that at the time was more closely associated with clerical and intellectual work. Saying you're spending time on the computer just sounds more respectable to a lot of people than saying you're watching TV. And everything about the iMac's design screamed late-90s all-in-one TV (without the tuner or DVD drive)... except it was obviously a computer. It was a psychological trojan horse of sorts.
You missed that Microsoft also recommitted to developing Office for Mac. The multi colored iMacs weren’t offered at first either it was just the bondi blue. NeXT was struggling also when Apple purchased them. They weren’t very successful and their OS never got the attention it deserved.
It's also worth noting that the original mac was an absolute piece of shit that was born out of Steve Jobs' ego.
The mac didn't have any cooling fans, so the chips kept popping out and the official way to resolve this was to pick it up and drop it on your desk.
It was also intended to be the budget model, but that wasn't what Jobs wanted so it got awkwardly frankensteined into being their flagship product - killing off a much more capable computer with a much more justifiable price point.
The result was a heavy, unreliable and slow computer that had a reputation for being a complete waste of money, all because Steve Jobs didn't want to step aside and let someone who actually understood how to design and build computers get credit for the success of the business, as opposed to a malignant narcissist with little to no actual knowledge of the industry besides being an exceptionally effective salesman.
@@casanovafunkenstein5090
Okay but you can't deny that the Performas of the 90s or systems like the PowerBook 5300 line wasn't worse, or before that in the late 80s when Apple made nothing but ungodly expensive Macintosh II series machines, one of which was sold for around $10k.
- netscape *was* free unless you were a business
- every computer worked like that at the time because built in modems were standard that wasn't new or groundbreaking
- dial-up didn't work like that
- apple reduced their lines to 4 computers, not 2.
- the imac came with multiple Web browsers and let you choose the default
- you didn't show the Hockey Puck mouse, which was Ive and Jobs favourite feature and everyone hated it.
- Next was bought because Copland was dead and apple needed an OS. They very nearly went with BEOS instead. Not because of stagnating lines.
- no mention of the clones that actually were killing apple
- again overstatement of the mac, its importance or how "groundbreaking" it was.
Idk 5/10 maybe?
I noticed about half of these things without looking. This really was a poorly researched video. No mention of the molar Mac that apple was already developing either.
I wanted an iMac so badly. We had them in our computer lab when I was in high school.
my elementary school computer lab had about 20 or so normal, boring pcs, and two of these colorful, fun, futuristic imacs. i don't remember if i ever actually got to use one, but i so wanted to because they looked so futuristic in the late 90s/early 2000s!
1:58 This was a “WTF” moment for me LOL what an interesting segue… TO OUR SPONSOR!
I remember when these dropped, my elementary school IMMEDIATELY got them. They came with a fun 3D Dinosaur game that I played whenever I got the chance to go to the computer lab. Good times ❤
God I would do anything to get my hands on an iMac G3, I taught myself how to use a computer on one of those when I was 2 and the nostalgia is so real!
The iMacs back then were pretty cool. But they were only pretty paperweights because there wasn’t that much software written for them.
I remember looking at these computers and wanting one so bad. As a kid i LOVED taking apart electronics so i can see whats inside it and the semi clear iMac was SO COOL to me.
I jist wanna say thankyou fornnot dragging this out to a 4 hour video essay. Love your vids
In 10 years, NationSquid will put out as many classic videos per week as a squid has tentacles.
Gotta say my man, you are creating top notch RUclips content. It's almost as if you've lived through the 90s and 00s. Spot on, brother.
I didn't see mentioned the thing that I believe made the most impact on the home computer market: forced adoption of USB. Before the iMac, there were special ports for keyboard/mouse, serial (including external modems and PDAs), printers (though also used by scanners and zip drives), and to a lesser extent external hard drives. USB had the potential to replace them all, but in the wintel world it was introduced as just yet another port to confuse people.
The iMac got rid of those ports, for better or worse, in favor of attaching nearly everything by USB. And hardware manufacturers were dragged kicking and screaming into creating or adapting their hardware to work with USB in order to reach the Macintosh market, which also provided more incentive to support PC/Windows USB.
These still look like the coolest thing in the world. If I didn't use a Wacom for my work, I would love to just have one of these as a personal computer, just t'have
I remember wanting an iMac when they came out just because of the colors. The family computer was a Windows though.
I remember vividly in grade 2 the first time I saw these in the computer lab. It was AMAZING! It was like being beamed into the future going from the old and ugly beige computers with big clunky keyboards to these colourful translucent computers with thin and minimalist keyboards. And then there was OS X which was like nothing I'd seen before. Going from Windows which was still very grey and square, to OS X which was colourful, with rounded graphics was simply breathtaking. Although I do remember that first version of OS X crashing or freezing a lot lol. The spinning beachball of death!
I dont have a G3, unfortunately, but I did manage to get myself an Imac G4 in recent years and I love it. Its not colourful like this one, but its very futuristic. With a thin screen that rotates ontop of a heavy base with the computer inside. It came with a keyboard, mouse and speekers. It works and was only 40 quid!
We called those the “lampshade” iMac back in the day!
I remember when these came out and my I.T. colleagues and I just scoffed at them. “Meh, it’s a Mac. No one cares what color their computers is. How dumb.” Of course, the public proofed us wrong.
I miss the days when being a mac person was actually like a serious difference. RIP orange iMac. You were beautiful.
You didn't "plug in your Ethernet", that was the phone line for dial-up...
So much content recently. This is fantastic.
iMac G3s were very influential for Apple as a turning point with Job’s return. Before G3s, Apple’s direction was simply following back on what they know massively produce it while barely change anything. Post G3s, stick to what works and improve upon it for the horizon ahead while making radical changes.
Sure am glad apple doesn't mass produce the same thing and change nothing about it now lol
I was around in 1994 and I can tell you this: Apple started tanking after Steve Wozniak left the Chairboard in 1986. Jobs was more the "Face" of the Company, but Wozniak was the Brains and the one Running things. Jobs and Wozniak were more like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis Meyer. When Jobs left in 1985, it was considered a slipup by Apple, but shortly after launching the 16-bit Apple IIGS in October 1986 to take on the Commodore Amiga, Wozniak left the company, so without Both Steves, Apple became directionless and although The Macintosh Pizza Box LC lines hit in 1989-1991, Apple quickly saw its Marketshare crumble in the fact of even MORE competition like Packard Bell and HP as well as NEWCOMERS Compaq and Gateway.
The thing that ALMOST killed Apple Computer entirely was the Apple Newton PDA in 1993. This Revolutionary quite ahead of its time PDA Device was released TOO early to the market and was completely underpowered,improperly tested, Expensive and had Buggy and Unfinished Software.(Watch OddityArchive's Video on it) Apple lost almost $1 billion from it and Launched the Successful Quadra Mac line in early 1994. Quadra actually HELPED Clot Bleeding of Apple, but the Newton was such an unmitigated DISASTER that it caused Apple to be hit with a $4 Billion Deficit that had continued to climb.
When Windows 95 and the Internet Craze Struck in 1995, Apple immediately realized that they were about to be left in the Dust, and were WISE enough to realize that they needed to make some compromises, buying NeXT was their way of getting Steve Jobs back, and their way of Inticiting Wozniak to return, licensing Microsoft's Internet Explorer was Logical Common Sense. Netscape was HORRIBLE. Buggy,Slow, Janky and often riddled with unfixed firmware. Gates and Apple were going to have to put aside their differences and work together if Apple were to survive.
The iMac was created in 1996 with the return of Jobs and with Wozniak NOW Heading R&D. It was introduced in late 1997 exactly 11 years after IIGS(IIGS had been incorporated into the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom in 1988-1989). By 1999, Apple was NO longer bleeding Money.
@@RebZoomer I mean they don’t; compared to the ridiculous amount of products they produced in the 1980s-1990s. They were all just rehashes of the Macintosh.
Basically cut down all the insane amount of product variants they were putting out to just two, one desktop and laptop each in consumer and pro versions. The real genius move was simplifying their product line like that.
I was a guy without excess money in college and boy, did I find these beautiful computers!
BABE WAKE UP NEW NATIONSQUID VIDEO JUST DROPPED 🔥 sound the alarms
*airhorn noise* 📣💥
@@Chaosbean-1443⏰🚨🚨⏰🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨⏰⏰🚨🚨🚨😧
Ugh, this comment is so worn out... get new material. 🙄
@@BleachDemon707 Born and raised in Frown Town I see 💀
"Plug-in your Ethernet..."
We wish we had broadband 😂
I was just thinking of buying one of these on ebay in the original bondi blue when I saw this!
The iMac is so friggin' cuuuuute!! So round and colorful!
“life is hard when you’re good looking” I love this
real
so many new nationsquid videos I'm overwhelmed!! and overjoyed 😁
i love these mac videos
I literally just tracked down and bought two of these to restore, and was wondering when NationSquid would do a video on the iMac G3. Somehow less than 24hrs later it gets released
I learned how to use the word processor on a macintosh in late elementary school I think. and I'm grateful for that because the Microsoft Word I think it was I ended up working close enough to the same way.
i remember we had those colorful macs in elementary… great times playing runescape on that
I hope technology with this futuristic transparent style like the Imac comes back, it genuinely looks so much more refreshing than the dull minimalistic designs we have nowadays for computers.
Okay, so you kinda lost me at the built in modem part. By the time iMac came out 56k modem was fairly standard on PCs
Our school had both styles at the same time and they didn't realize why some in the class were not in the same spot in the lesson because they were a hundred times faster lmao 🤣 floppys were fun the Oregon trail enough said
You had a perfect opportunity to say the floppy disk flopped
Im pretty sure i read somewhere that Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web on a NeXT computer. He also made comments on how easy it was to operate and how much he liked the machine. That's a pretty cool achievement for NeXT
great video man
No reply’s? why
11:22 Seeing how cracked the internal bezel on the front of your imac is, have you seen the kickstarter for the reinforced replacement?
I remember my elementary school had two iMacs in the art room, but we were forbidden from going anywhere near them... I wonder what they were ever there for??
I remember using blue iMacs at my elementary school library. They were so cool! :D
The middle school I attended in 1999 had just bought a whole bunch of these that fall. I thought they looked really cool, but hated MacOS. When I switched schools 2 years later, in a neighboring district, I was elated to discover they were using Windows 98 and had Netscape.
The only problem with the PowerPC macs (G3 etc) was that they always had half the amount of ram the OS required to run without swap filing an old IDE magnetic HDD disc for about 3 minutes before anything happened. Slowing down productivity in educational environments maybe to this day.
My memories of these lovely macs is waiting long periods of time. Coming from a graphic design background. They _felt_ nice to work on but they were too slow because they were painful to use _unless_ you doubled the ram from the standard 8/16MB.
And yet today's Apple claims 8gb of ram in their computers is like 16gb in others.
Honestly. 8GB is enough for general purpose use. If you are using Adobe or pro audio it wouldn't be enough.@@Paul_Maynard But back then you couldn't open an email without staring at the pinwheel for a few minutes.
Wait, So the whole reason why G5's from my primary school run like shit was a lack of memory? Thinking about it now it have sense. And those guys still are allergic to giving decent amounts of RAM
@@krazownik3139 It's worse if your using Photoshop. Well, almost impossible. I worked at two studios that put me on a 15 year old mac with not enough ram. Real actual working professional businesses, in the field of desktop publishing and don't understand about memory!
I'm bending over backwards for insanely trivial constant changes and making the 15th revision of a newsletter no-one will eve read. Pdf's could take so long to render,
Your numbers are off. I worked at Apple dealers during this era, and sold lots of these systems. The iMac (and Power Mac G3) started at 32MB of RAM. IMHO, 64MB was a more realistic base amount, but I typically recommended to my customers to just add another 128MB module since it didn’t cost that much (when using quality third-party RAM; Apple’s RAM prices were absurd).
You have to go back two more generations to find any systems with 8MB base memory.
I do, however, agree with the general sentiment that Apple back then sold systems with far too little base RAM, a practice they continued for a long time.
I think today’s base RAM is more realistic, insofar as there are real technical reasons why Macs need less RAM than Windows for many things. For ordinary basic computer use, it’s enough. (Not to mention that swapping to an SSD is not nearly the nightmare that swapping to HDD was!) I still always tell people to buy RAM generously, though!!!
3:10 nah man when i was a kid, I LEARNED HTML and CSS by my BARE HANDS and made my OWN website with my OWN CODE. It's been 5 years since my first website..
13:46 when he says "rapidly receiving tons of support".
The subs say " rapidly receiving tons of technical support".
Thought that was weird.
Perhaps the iMac G3 used and showed in this video should have been running the version of Mac OS it came with, Mac OS 8.1 ^^;
Literally been watching your videos all day and just refreshed my page to see this!
Good for you. 🙄
Is your day complete now?
Please, when you record b-roll of windows, do install graphics drivers beforehand. It's awful to look at that 16-color vga picture and it does not represent the daily usage of windows.
11:07 not ethernet but phone line.
adore your channel dude
hi squiddy, I love your content 🩷 just curious, are you interested in lost media at all? would you ever make a video on something like Everyone Knows That or another lost song? I'd love to hear your take on it!!
This is my first thing I’m doing in the morning!
you're the first thing I'm doing in the morning 😉
Wow.
It must be changing your life then, huh? 🙄
Getting that t shirt was pure dedication.
What is the most modern computer or laptop right now that closely replicates the style of the iMac or iBook?
honestly, we need another computer that is just like the iMac. nowadays it looks like we’ve gone another 15 years backwards in design.
I remember when the iMac first launched. I wanted one so much. Lol.
ITS BEEN A DAY
The problem with the original Mac was the fact that computers were still too slow to offer extraneous features, like the GUI, that will limit the max RAM for the software you really wanted to run. Combined with the IBM blunder with the allowed creation of the IBM PC Compatible. Made MSDOS based apps popular. Allowing Windows 95, which came out as computers are consistently over 25mhz, with 32bit CPU, and over 16 megabytes of RAM. Plus it supported the existing MSDOS apps, and for less than OS/2 Warp.
The Apple i series and Power series. Help get Apple out of their rut, long enough for the iPod and iPhone, that would accelerate the company.
2:00 dont be delusional NationSquid.. /j
11:04 WHATTTTTT; learning something new every day (iMac had preprogrammed drivers for internet)
Every Mac for many years had included the necessary drivers. (Many models had modems, either standard or optional, and external modems were common, too.) The iMac included a few more pre-configured configurations and setup wizards for more ISPs. Not surprising, given that the “i” in iMac stands for “internet”.
4:04 "Haemorrhaging Money". Ha, reminds me of what John Sculley said in the steve jobs movie, Jobs (2013).
We called them the Jolly Rancher Mac back in the day and I wanted one badly but my parents bought the cheap Dell instead😢
NationSquid is bae
11:12 "you just have to plug in the eaternet" no you have to dial in
I needed a computer at the time and having to learn the intricies PC made it daunting to me but luckily also at the time i was using Macs quite alot = i purchase my first iMac G4, my biggest regret 2 weeks later they release the iMac DV which had a DVD player in the machine.... also Macs pretty much had NO games so no more late night ganes & procrastinating studies.
6:46 "object-oriented"
:wakes up in a cold sweat, final exam nightmare:
plug in their ethernet? Wasnt it a phoneline at that time?
For home users, yes, absolutely. But in businesses and schools, Ethernet was already very common. Apple was acutely aware of this, which is why the first iMac was equipped with a then-luxurious 10/100Mbps Ethernet port, not the 10Mbps Ethernet that was common at the time.
In 1999, Apple would release the AirPort Base Station, which in addition to being a WiFi router, was also a dialup-to-Ethernet router. (I.e. your internet connection could be either dialup or Ethernet, and it would share those with your entire WiFi and Ethernet network. For many people, this was their first home network.)
Great Stuff!
OMMGGG IM EARLY (I LOVE your videos btw you’ve taught me so much never give up
Not only did Apple have an innovative design but they also had more control over the hardware. At this time, Microsoft was easing into plug-and-play, which was more of a minefield. The USB port was also just introduced.
You’re the one who Justin wrote Bringing Sexy Back about? Nice
Steve Jobs really knew how to market products to the US. Where I am from in central EU I have never seen an iMac being used and I knew nobody who owned one.
I did own an iPod, however, since an mp3 player was a natural evolution from my MiniDisc player.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple he somehow knew that Apple would do better as a "lifestyle" brand as opposed to a tech brand. And that is how Apple is still viewed today: most people buy Apple products to flex their wealth (some do use Apple products because they genuinely like and extensively use the features of those products but they are outnumbered by the people who just buy them as a status symbol). And this is a very US-specific issue where everyone is more concerned with looking rich and successful rather than actually being successful. It's why Japanese car companies made separate luxury divisions in the US with completely different names to sell luxury cars there as the average American considers Japanese cars to be cars for the working class, not cars for the rich.
Apple products werent even sold in Central EU til 1998.
Gee wonder why their market share isn't high there. 🙄
I don’t think Jobs was CEO of Apple until he returned.
Correct. He was Chairman of the Board of early Apple.
At least now I know why I saw nothing but iMac's at my high school lol
EARLY FOR NATIONSQUID VIDEOS SLAY 🗣️‼️‼️‼️
IBook and IMac G3 where a short of "Art Nouveau" rinnovation for the design of computers (the clamshell IBook was like an hybrid for me from that art of 1890's and Y2K sensations of 1990's 😅) and Jonathan Ive was a short of early Peter Barhens before the "less is more" approach
5:06 Steve Jobs was not CEO in 1985, when he left Apple. John Sculley was CEO in 1985.
Last iMac i liked. We have a newer mac and they ruined it when they quit making it compatible with a lot of games. It is not a gaming machine anymore. When we had them in school you could run anything game or program on them you wanted. Now I will stick with windows least I cant still run multiple games on windows.
I want to go back in time and be apart of the meeting where apple was discussing what this new 'iMac' was going to look like , and give Steve Jobs a handshake.
Hehe Netscape. I had a copy of it built into this old acer laptop I had. It was to open instruction/ help files that were stored on the computer in html. I was pretty sure netscape was dead before the computer was built so I thought it was nifty.
LETS GOO NATIONSQUID POST
another nice vid