I own three. One Blueberry 350mhz like in this video, but its flyback transformer has failed. Then I have 450mhz Indigo, which is working great. Lastly, I have the original 233mhz Bondi Blue, which is almost spotless and working great!
I had the last version of this iMac. 400 mhz,20 gb hd in Bondi Blue. My first Mac! Maxed out the memory and opened it up to put in a120 gb drive. Didn’t know how to do this but…RU-vid to the rescue! There was any wasted space inside. Did the same on another G3 iMac. Got $200 off since the G4 iMac had just been released.
These have a special place in my heart as I graduated from high school in 1999. We were a PC school, and I was a PC guy my entire life. I didn't start getting interested in these machines until just a few years ago. I absolutely love them now and wish I had paid them more attention back in the day.
I remember in the early 2000s, a bunch of my friends had these machines and they were failing left and right. Usually it was the hard drive, which makes sense, but as you mentioned, the heat death is likely the culprit.
Oh yes $1299 vs $499 I remember getting our first home computer. Its why Windows 98-XP reigned supreme for so long. Then I wondered how school could afford them 😂.
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Back then I worked at a company that repaired and sold Macs. I remember some of these had a bug where there would be a low humming sound coming from the speakers. Therefore, I had to replace quite some motherboards. Seeing the panels come off bring back memories. Unfortunately, at the time I didn't have the money to buy one myself. They looked so cute and appealing. The design and colour did a lot to make it a device everyone would want to own.
I managed to find a iMac G5 at school, it turned out it was the best launch model, with a SuperDrive, Nvidia FX5200 Ultra, and I upgraded it to 2GBs of DDR ram, it's running Sorbet Leopard. Anyone have ideas on what to use it for now?
@Louis Ng I tried to play halo but no license key, surfing the web is average, it also has a AirPort wifi card installed. I also tried to install Adelie Linux, but it refused to boot the disc.
lot of nostalgia for the g3. my grandma had my uncles 1998 model and i used to play a few kids games on it and watch youtube (this was 2009-2011 so it could actually run not well though) it’s somewhere in my downstairs cupboard at the minute
First of all thanks brings back memories. That was my first iMac G3 233Ghz Bondi green. Later upgraded the ATI (now AMD) VRAM. RAM to 32MB. 10GB drive. Came with Mac OS 8.1. Later upgraded to 10.2
I had one of these!! That computer is in my earliest memories. I remember the slot loading disc drive was a pain and didn't eat or eject the disc like it was supposed to, so sometimes you would have to wait for it to stop what it's doing and hit the eject key, rinse and repeat until the disc came out. I remember it was never plugged into a surge outlet and sometimes I wouldn't unplug it during a thunderstorm but it kept on working. I haven't used it in at least 13 years, but its been sitting in the original box. EDIT: I remember my elementary school had a ton of these and the eMacs in the computer labs, they were on OSX and the beachball of death was always around the corner. Keep in mind, I was 5 at the time so it was 2006
Never owned a G3 iMac but I had one of the iconic "lampshade" G4 iMacs, several PowerMac G4s which were works of art. Wish I had been able to keep some of them. Also briefly had a Power Mac G5 Dual processor system till the motherboard failed.
In elementary school, our library had a fleet of these things, brand new. They were so much cooler than my 486 Windows 3.1 machine, and I coveted those G3's until I bought one on ebay in 2020. Not that much use to it, but it's attractive nerd room decor.
I just took out my Son's Imac Bluberry from Mothballed for so many years. Your Video is very usefull esp. the Battery Replacement which we dont even know its there.
We had these in my high school study hall. I wish I appreciated them more back then. I literally never gave them a second thought at that time, other than being frustrated they didn't run Windows lol
I rescued an eMac from a landfill not too long ago. I pretty much did everything you did including the eucalyptus oil. I’m thinking about putting an ssd in it connecting it to a hifi stereo and using it for music.
These things were all over my school's computer labs in the late 90s/early 2000s. My friends and I would always play Nanosaur on them during free periods or when our schoolwork was finished early.
Love love love my original ruby red G3. Just instaled an ide to sd card board where the hdd was going. It’s slow now. But solid state is awesome. No moving parts.
Loved these computers. Back in kindergarten through 2nd grade we had those computers in every part of my elementary school. We were one of the last schools in my school district that hasn’t switched to Windows computers. Unfortunately as of right now, all those computers were switched out with Windows however as far as I can remember there are Macintosh computers dating as far as the early 90s still sitting around in random classrooms in that school collecting dust. Maybe I could get my hands on a couple.
My elementary and middle school had a ton of these everywhere, the the teachers had one, every classroom had a few and in middle school we even had a mobile computer lab cart full of the white laptops. Good times
Awesome video! I had one of these I picked up at a thrift store long ago. It was my first experience with any sense of Mac products and now looking back never realized how modular they were
I have something like it. Have the original keyboard and round mouse that came with it. My unit has the firewire port and the external VGA connector in the back. My main gripe is that the image on the crt has shrunk a bit and it seems to be running hot. I recall some one had posted a video where they "converted" one of these units by striping out everything (but saving everything) and outfitted the housing with a 15 inch lcd monitor and installed the guts out of an iMac mini, effectively bringing the machine into the "modern age". I remember loading a lot of my CD's into the machine and I need to remove the hard drive so as to extract the files and load them onto my MB Pro. T he music was converted to unprotected AAC format which will allow me to save the music and load it onto any machine without issues. It’s really a pity that Apple doesn’t make a conversion kit to update these classics so todays kids can really enjoy a colorful and useful computer.
Great video! I never owned one, but I used them in my University’s computer lab, back in the late 1990s. What did you use to clean off the screen? I don’t know whether or not lens cleaner would work on a CRT display.
Had 3 of these (2 the same or slightly newer) and 1 that’s the original iMac G3 with the tray loading and I love these machines. I have a windows emulator on mine what’s runs incredibly smooth and is super fun to play with
Best looking CRT based MAC aside from the old black and white macs from the mid to late 80s, I wish I still had the Bondi blue I owned while living in Bondi beach (yes named after the water color at the one and the same beach I lived down the road from)
The later models of the iMac G3 were pretty nice and even had decent graphics (up to 16Mb Rage 128 Ultra). The slot-loading iMacs are the most interesting since they have a good balance between old and new. You can play older classic games as well as early 3D games, even UT2003 is (barely) possible. Mac OSX tends to be a bit slow on the iMac G3 and 9.x should be the maximum OS to be installed. Although OSX can be used for more compatibility and to transfer files. Mac OS classic can be a pain in the b*tt when it comes to the resource fork. PCs and newer Mac OS will often destroy disk-images and programs by ignoring the resource fork and even sit-files can be damaged on modern Mac OS X. For the transfer of files between older machines over the internet and through modern systems it is important to encode the files as either binhex or binary (HQX, BIN). This will embed the resource fork into the encoded data-stream. Stuffit-Expander can decode "bin" and "hqx" files without problem.
Psivewri, I just wanna say that I have been a fan of yours and Hugh Jeffery’s channel for a while and I really like old tech like you and getting to fix them up and etc. Every time I get the chance in school for free time, I would watch you and like 2 weeks ago I found a emac at a thrift shop and I was surprised. I have a late 2008 MacBook 2 gigs of ram, core 2 duo and it’s running 10.11 but I have been trying to use this other hard drive to install 10.13 but it won’t install like the issue you had with that iMac you found in the dumpster and it for some reason won’t detect my Wi-Fi card. But I just want to thank you for making me happy when I watch these videos and I will continue to watch them. (P.S. I’m sorry this is so long)
Bugdom! YEEEEEAH! Funnily enough, you can actually play Bugdom natively on modern Macs, as Iliyas Jorio recompiled this game (along with several other classic Pangeasoft games) to run on Windows and modern MacOS.
wowowo this is awesome you and linus inspired me at 9 to build pcs lol i am surprised i did it without parent supervision and it worked nice vid nathan
Feel like a lot of these youtubers say stuff like "I found it in a dumpster" or "I saw someone throw it away"😂 I mean if it's all true then I must be the most unlucky guy haha
Wow, I was surprised when you surmised that the machine *didn't* run hot during its lifetime. Back in college our computer lab had many Wintel PCs but there was also a section with nothing but iMacs like these and they were ALWAYS running hot. Also, LMAO at the MAXTOR hard drive!! XD
Does anyone remember this weird program I had on this as a kid? It was a little square window with a face, eyes, nose, a mouth, that would look at your mouse cursor move around, react to it, say random lines like "your epidermis is showing", and would eat the mouse if you got too close. As far as I remember that was its only function, and I seem to remember it being called "Snit", maybe that's just what the shortcut was called, but I can find no reference online to what seems to exist only in my head unless I can prove it lol Does anyone else remember this? It may have come with a software demo booklet that came withe iMac.
