#lime imac g3

[w4lkmann]

i just realized i never posted this on my. main blog so why not. post it here yassss

[krjpalmer]

MacAddict September 2001

Hits and misses (so far as the conventional wisdom went) cluster on the cover as MacAddict reached its fifth anniversary issue. "The best and worst of everything Mac" covered more than just the five years of the magazine's existence (with David Reynolds's editorial flashing back to being asked whether joining "a new Macintosh magazine" was a good idea in 1996 even as he declared he'd be leaving now); the news section happened to proclaim what the best and worst moments of the magazine itself had been.

[nineties-effect]

[smash-or-pass-objects]

[55566688833]

Apple IMac G3, Lime Variant

[0xywave]

g3 lime imac save me

[pigswithwings]

hey jpeg! i was wondering what your favorite computer is, since computers are like so cool :) mine is an imac g3 in the color blueberry!

points at my head :] of course mine is the imac g3 in Lime but i also really really love the commodore amiga!! especially the amiga 500 they are so lovely ...

[applemuseumpoland]

iMac G3 Lime Sloat Loading, 1999

[skittle-is-little]

DUDE I HAVE THE BEST IDEA

imac g3 oc

not sure which colour to use tho but limes pretty swag

[computerspotting]

lime iMac G3

꧁★꧂

[koralatov]

Goodnight, G3

Last weekend, on my first Saturday off in too many weeks, two iMacs G3 disintegrated in my hands. There was nothing I could do; they were too old, too frail, too well-travelled to survive even this most delicate of handling.

Both had given good service to their original owners, countless hours of the peaceful, fanless computation that ultimately doomed them. In the end, more than twenty years after they were made, even my gentlest touch unleashed a snowstorm of beige flakes, painfully visible through cracking candy plastics.

When it became apparent that neither could be saved – as the fruit-colour shells themselves split apart along hairline cracks and precision-moulded stress points – I salvaged what I could. It wasn’t much: a couple of speaker housings, a 700 MHz motherboard, the small Apple logos from the top. The CRTs went to “e-cycling”; the rest, landfill.

As I swept up grains of plastic from the laminate, I realised that this didn’t so much mark the end of an era as mark my acceptance that the era had long ended. It had happened already, some years ago, and I was just slow to acknowledge it.

As sad as it is, I realise it’s past time to concede that these computers are long past their usefulness as anything other than objets d’art or retro-computing curiosities. The internet has long left them behind, even despite the Herculean efforts of one dedicated fan.

Any task that can be accomplished on them is either one done using abandoned software, done to use abandoned software,1 or done on the nerd-equivalent of a masochism. Once a common trope, I haven’t seen a blog-post about using a PowerPC Mac exclusively for a month2 in probably ten years.

Even as I consign them to memory and retirement as attractive curios, it feels important to mount one last defence of the iMac G3 and its contemporaries. It was, on a public note, the Computer That Saved Apple. (Others – many, many others – have written about this so I won’t go into detail; Six Colors does a good job.)

But I can write about these personally, from my own perspective. These were machines of startling longevity. They remained useful, productive computers, with current software, for over half a decade in an era when an 18 month lifespan wasn’t unusual. A writer and academic I knew wrote on his original iMac (no G3; they were just “iMac” when he got his) for nearly 20 years before it died and was retired.

A close contemporary of these machines, my own 466 MHz iBook G3, in its original graphite livery at that point, was my primary computer until mid 2008 when I eventually switch to an Intel MacBook Pro. The MacBook was a much better computer but a far worse object.

That iBook, now in Lime thanks to a friend’s dexterous transplant, existed alongside an iMac G4. The G4 was my first Mac, and one about which I’ve written about before, but it was on a TV stand in the living room, relegated mostly to media-watching and disc-burning.

The iBook, in contrast, was everywhere that I was: my first ever laptop, and the computer that transformed computing from a desk-and-chair activity to an everywhere activity. That old G3, at times pokey and with an increasingly whiny hard-disk, prefigured the current era of ubiquitous, totally connected computing that the iPhone took to its logical conclusion less than a decade later.

These G3 machines, for those of us who had the enterprise to find them late, and lacked the budget to abandon them early, spanned the era from intermittently connected to always connected. They carried me and others from the past into the present, and did so reliably, elegantly, and mostly silently.

And now that we’re delivered into the present, and they are no longer fit to carry us, it’s time to treasure the few that remain intact, functional, and beautiful. There’s no shame in retirement when so much has been achieved.

Even I’m not immune to this. I would like, one day, to replay the first two Fallout games again on my beautiful Blue Dalmatian iMac. It seems appropriate to re-play them on a computer that could almost have existed in-game and resembles the one on which they were first played: projected at me as slightly ionised light from a deadly, high-voltage tube of glass and phosphor. ↩︎

Demonstrating how far these beautiful, useless machine have fallen from the cultural memory, googling “using a g3 for one month” returns videos about some LG OLED TV. ↩︎

[w4lkmann]

grape g3 imac :D

[krjpalmer]

Macworld March 1999

The high-end desktop Mac received an iMac-like makeover, even as “Bondi blue” passed into history with the now-plural iMacs packaged in five fruit flavours. (A sixth flavour to match the six stripes now painted out of the Apple logo would presumably have risked all the connotations of “lemon,” or at least brought Bloom County’s Banana Junior 6000 to mind...) David Pogue’s back-page column in this issue did take on how uninformed and unenthusiastic CompUSA’s staff seemed about the Macintosh, even as enthusiastic volunteers took it on themselves to go into the stores and tidy up the desktops of the demonstration Macs.

[kc-the-writer]

I love Y2K, but this this wildly romanticised. I like that.

Friday: January 19, Y2K

7am: You wake up to the indestructable digital alarm clock radio your parents have had since your little brother was born. A static version of 'All the Small Things' jolts you from your teal, purple, and lime daisy print bedding. The smell of mom's Sunkissed Raspberry spray from Bath and Body Works permeates from the beach-themed bathroom adjacent to your bedroom.

7:30: Dressed in your denim skirt and Old Navy tee, you search for your cork-sole clogs. Your brother is at the breakfast table, crunching on French Toast Crunch. You shudder and reach for a Pop-Tart (s'mores, duh!) and wait for the bus.

9:00am - 3:00pm: It's a school day. Saying the pledge and drinking milk at lunch are non-negotiable. Don't question it out loud. Don't question anything out loud.

You sit in the library and learn that the Dewey Decimal System is the lifeblood of informative media. Don't question it out loud. Don't question anything out loud.

You move to the computer lab to type in a never-ending URL into a computer with the power of a modern calculator. It loads for 15 minutes, and you browse for 10. You feel like you've seen the future.

The only time you worry about your safety within the walls of your school is when you don your nylon gym shorts and prepare to run The Mile. You don’t stop to consider this is a privilege.

You go back to class, and the teacher tells you how happy the indigenous were to learn and integrate with the settlers. He keeps a straight face about it. Don't question it out loud. Don't question anything out loud.

The science teacher is out sick, and the sub brought sodas, and he wheels in THE A/V Cart. Bill Nye is about to blow your mind. Life is good.

4:30pm You beg your dad to let you play snake on his Nokia. But you can't call a friend until Free Nights and Weekends plans start at 9. Still, your pecking away at the keys of a cellular phone and feel like you’re accomplishing something important in that 15 minutes.

6:00pm Mum is home. You have to log off the Tangerine iMac G3; homework can wait because she needs to use the phone. She's too tired to cook, but it's the weekend, and you have a Book-It Personal Pan coming your way. The family heads to Pizza Hut. Life is good.

8:00pm Full of pizza on a Friday night.... you know where you're going. The family rents The Mummy. You can't wait to find this in the poster racks at the mall.

10:30pm Everyone goes to bed, but you're under the blankets with a flashlight, lost in the story of a boy with a scar on his forehead. Only three more chapters to go until you've earned the next pizza.

Life is good in the Y2K if you don't question things. For one magical moment in time, you don't feel the need to question things. Not until next year when you start to question everything. That day will come soon enough.

But you're a kid today. So you settle into the peace you feel from the comfort of your inflatable chair and remember life is good. Stay a while in the Chrome Age; life is good.

Thursday, January 18.

Y2K.

Picture the scene: your phone rings, it's a Nokia. You do not simply walk down the street, no, you roll down it. You roll because you wear Heelys (unless, of course, you own jelly shoes). When you get home, you will check on your (digital, sadly) animal companion at Littlest Pet Shop. Then it's time to kick back, relax, and switch on your V-Tech. When the weekend arrives, you will likely rent a video, maybe even a DVD, and you will do so from Blockbuster. And when there is nothing to do, absolutely nothing, you will pass many a happy hour watching those strange pipes in primary colors extending and bending around the sleepy screen of your PC. 

The time: the 2000s. Enjoy it while it lasts, and remember, it will be back before you know it. 

[nineties-effect]

[cosmiiccrayonz]

I got a free Lime Green iMac G3 yesterday :3c 💚✨