Addendum comment! 1. Pronunciation of "Bondi Blue" (bond-eye vs bond-ee): this falls under "tomato tomato potato potato"- please call your comments off! Language is fluid and if you understand what I mean, that's probably good enough. I pronounce lots of words "wrong" since I'm USian/Minnesotan/whatever. I've heard Apple staff say either one, so I'm confident my meaning is clear here. Besides, if I said it the other way, you all would tell me in the comments how wrong I am! Can't win! ;) 2. See above about pronunciation of GIF. :P 3. I've added a "donation inquiry" section to my contact form at vkc.sh. I probably won't respond in the comments about hardware donations, but you can try the contact form if you have something interesting for this or any other vintage computer I've mentioned on the channel.
Pffft. . . .Americans! Is that eeeither or is it eyether? 🙂 Now all you need to find is a mint-condition Apple Lisa, and then brace ourselves for some more comedy gold with how to pronounce the aforementioned name.
@theducks.org but Apple employees literally say it both ways, so maybe we don't need to comment about it, especially when I asked folks not to. Like, there's no way to say it without inviting critical comments from someone. Language is fluid and maybe don't get bothered by folks pronouncing things different than you?
I remember when I was a kid and these started showing up in my friends' bedrooms. It was a lot of people's first computer that was really theirs -- not the "family's" computer. Good memories!
I love repair and you did a good job! In the modern era, I love to show people how I’m still rocking a Mid 2012 MacBook Pro I got from a dumpster. Amazing how usable dumpster finds are! Glad you restored this one and didnt let it go to waste!
Killer video! I feel like I really missed an opportunity to pick one of these up when every college and high school was dumping these for cheap, so now I'm relegated to getting a fixer-upper, and I'm going to absolutely reference this when I eventually find the imac g3 of my dreams
Great find. My first computer was an Apple IIGS and years later my first iMac was a well loved iMac G4. Loved that machine. Later I owned the Quicksilver and Mirror Drive Doors PowerMacs which were just beautiful.
I love how accessible your videos are. Your explanations are always ever so clear and understandable. Please keep making more awesome videos like this Veronica 🤘
Great recovery on the iMac! The iMac colour was named after an Australian beach, and it's pronounce Boni-eye, not Bond-ee - there is a big debate on the Apple RU-vid community on this one. Apple marks the caps as part of a checklist post production. This was common in a lot of manufacturers at the time. If the CD-ROM drive is not flush up against the front of the iMac, then it is not mounted correctly. I think you pointed out about the tabby thing, just make sure it hooks into the wire 'U' or Omega shaped spring. BTW, I saw your subnet mask... :)
Great video! So just last week, one of my best friends and I *just* got his orange iMac back up and running again. Great find, and looking forward to your Linux video with this!
Excellent video. This gave a great synopsis of your quest without falling too far into the weeds. These old machines are wonderful; I'm happy you saved this one from a landfill. Great job!
omg. i have that same guitar, that same bop it, and just picked up a broken imac g3 trying to restore and found your video. did we just become best friends! thank you for posting this, it is going to be really helpful!
Each and every one of my personal projects are always seen through to completion, and I'm going to keep telling myself that to avoid my deep shame and embarrassment.
Since you did mention image format pronunciation and obligate me to comment, I guess I must do so: I love your channel and am happy to have found it, thanks for the videos!
Excellent and helpful. I have a Bondi iMac of my own, acquired last year, that I need to open up and inspect. Videos like yours help me prepare for all of the components that will need attention. Thank you for this. Subscribed.
@@eupher2 Even after discharge, though, there's still some damage that can be done even beyond the electrical concerns. Between vacuums and sensitive components, I feel good recommending to my viewers that they reach out to experienced technicians when it comes to the finer points of CRT repair.
@@VeronicaExplains That's true it can happen. I respect you for being safe and asking experienced people for help. I wasn't trying to be a wise guy or anything.
So just a guess but I have seen capacitors marked like that on RF boards before so I'd be willing to bet it's a certification/QA mark from the factory not someone refurbishing.
A friend of mine found a dozen iMacs in a dumpster behind a school. She asked for my help and I was able to get six of them running by exchanging parts between them. She let me have one of those we gotten to work for my time and trouble. This was back in 2003 when a G3 was still quite useful. Not long after that, a church gave me two newer IMac DVs, so I had three of them for awhile before selling them off. I sold the best one to a friend.
Love the Jeff Goldblum ad Easter Egg! I have a non-functioning slot-load G3 that I brought home about 12 years (and two house moves) ago, with the intention making an aquarium. This gives me hope that reviving it is a more realistic project, and it will fit in well with my G3 Powerbook and G3 iBook! Thank you for "finally getting around to this!"
How Bondi blue cool is that. Nicely done. It was too early for them, but I always thought the iMac would benefit from some tasteful LEDs under the back translucent cover. Not sure if it could be done on such a machine natively though.
The person on RU-vid whom, IMO has the most experience with CRTs is Adrian Black, he honestly has a bit of an obsession with them. I literally seen him stitch a broken CRT board back together, flyback and all, composite mods, he even got hold of a CRT rejuvenator and tested it on a few old CRTs once. He is imo probably the best person to ask about CRTs. Also worth noting, you should NEVER EVER open a CRT unless you know how to do it safely, the flyback is usually putting out between 17Kv to 24Kv, if you touch the wrong thing it means almost certain death. Stay safe 😀
A previous employer had a *lot* of iMacs. The pucks never even got to the users’ desks; they were all replaced with Logitech mice. We had a big box full of the unloved and unused things. They’re probably in a landfill.
Nice work! I learned a lot by watching your video. I regret giving away my mom's old G3 imac (green colored one), I should've kept it. I still have my old quicksilver G4 with the Iomega drive lol and also the mirrored drive doors G4.
Wow I loved this video!!!! Your so lucky you were able to find this comptuer like that! How nice it must be to escape the disgusting high prices of these units on online resellers! (your ebay meme about budget breaking made me laugh, its so true!!!) Also, appreciated you message on vintage electronics, always urks me to think of vintage comptuers that could be repurposed for other uses being recycled, or worse, thrown away incorrectly...
Nice job! I too am someone who can heat up a soldering iron as well as a keyboard. I have done a lot with old tube radios (I am old enough to say I cut my tech teeth on tube stuff), and that includes CRT's. For the most part you have a heater circuit with low voltage for the cathode filaments, three electron guns (fancy word for cathode) for red, green, and blue colors, a shadow mask for color convergence and an internal metallic "aquadag' coating. That's the internal anatomy of the CRT. The deflection yoke is three (usually) flat wound coils around the neck that control the electron beams with magnetic fields for the vertical/horizontal sync and picture scan interlace, and you have a "Flyback" transformer that provides the 15-20,000 volts to accelerate the electron beams from the guns into shadow mask/phosphor screen in the front of the tube. The flyback also provides the horizontal beam scan and helps with horizontal sync. Most of this stuff works together with some pretty tight tolerances. Usually if the high voltage flyback circuit craps out, it drags nearly everything else down with it. The best policy for a working crt system is cautiously clean it up with a low suction vacuum cleaner and judicious use of canned air. This is a great idea because high voltage has a big static field that attracts dust. Not only that, the dust will form structures that will eventually form defacto electrodes that can cause high voltage arcing. That will kill everything in short order! So, clean it up and "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies to the rest of everything in there. A word of caution: Please allow the unit to sit for at least half an hour before you open it up and start poking around in the CRT enclosure. There are caps in the flyback circut that can hold very high voltage for a period of time and that can hurt you or damage the equipment if they get shorted to ground with an errant hand tool or finger. Get all of the dust out, make it look pretty (no liquid cleaners please!) and it should work fine and last a long time... Thank you for the videos you post here. One of them inspired me to breathe life into a 2011 Macbook Pro with a nice Linux Mint install. Now it works better than it did on OS-X!
In my area (lower edge of Connecticut) we have "bulk trash pickup" twice a year where the city will haul away almost anything you put on the curb for free. People clean out their basements, attics, closets, etc, and pile it all up on the curb. 80% of it is trash, but about 20% is stuff that's still usable. I've seen 3-4 of these iMacs over the years. I know nothing about the Mac and dont' really have a desire for one. I did bring one home for my friend once. I think he got it working. I also gave him some kind of Mac that looked like a big, white CRT monitor (not one of the 4" thick flat ones), but he said that one didn't work. Of course I see a lot of old Dell and such systems. They usually fall into one of two categories: Complete, but older with weak specs, or newer with good specs, but missing components. Oh and laptops that are missing the power supplies about 98% of the time. The last one I found is a Dell i5 that doesn't boot. According to Google, it needs a new CMOS battery, which is super easy to install. You just remove the hard drive, remove the memory, remove the keyboard, open the case, take out the power switch, disconnect all the cables, remove the motherboard, flip it over and pop in the battery. Simple!
My sister had a 300MHz G3 iMac, I think it was one of the second gen models. I acquired it from her in 2004 after she was about to throw it out. This was back when my Linux skills were....so so; I knew of it, I remembered a few commands from my days of shell accounts, but that was about it. My primary issue back then was trying to install an OS you didn't know on your sole computer. There was this new distro people were talking about, Ubuntu. Since they had PPC support I decided to give it a try. Well that did the trick. I installed that early version of Ubuntu and did all my initial hardcore Linuxing on that iMac. Not an Apple fan, but it made a nice little Linux machine.
I attended a large, northeastern US university from 1999 to 2003. I remember campus computer labs filled with these machines as a freshman but by the time I was a junior, and a full fledged computer geek working for the university's residential network management arm, they were all gone. It's easy to forget just how quickly technology, the companies associated with it, and the pubic attitude towards it changed during that time period. I didn't see it happen but I'm sure my school filled dumpsters with iMacs over some summer break and brought in truck loads of Dell towers to replace them.
Awww, great to see a machine rescued, and it looks like it could be an early Rev A iMac too! I just got one of my own tahat's gonna need a little TLC, but this video made me smile! :)
I think it might be a revision B based on the board, but I need to finish reading the service manual. I'm excited to get cracking on some upgrades for it at some point, too. That'll be fun!
About 10 years ago I bought a slot-loader G3 DV out of a pile at an electronics recycler for $3, on the condition that I removed the hard drive onsite. That was one of my most challenging surgeries to date, only possible because I'd just done a combo drive swap on another G3 and it was fresh in my memory. The lone screw wedged somewhere in the case brought back some late nights spent trying to get those two G3s back together; I think it's a rite of passage for working on these machines.
wish you have seen adrian digital basements channels because i love how he work on almost a lot of old vintages computer and he explains more details about it i like it
The nostalgia is real with this, I don't know how many hours of Diablo 2 I played on one of these the same color. Luckily I had a 3rd party mouse as well that round thing looks ridiculous.
Admittedly, I'm not the biggest Mac fan out there but I do maintain a new M2 Air to keep tabs on the iDevices in the house...but in a corner sits a Graphite iMac DV SE with some upgrades...yes it still runs OS 9 cause I want it that way. Nice classic iMac with that lovely CRT display...so good for a trip back in time.
Another great video! I am embarrassed to say that my ey had one of these machines. I had put all of our music on it I realize now that I should have rescued it. Live and learn!
I grew up with apple clones and Macs. My first running with programming was on a Laser 128. I made online muds on mac II si and mac II ci. So much fun when things were more pure. I have a g3 silver bubble imac. I stay too busy in software to put any time into it though.
Funny that I returned to Slackware after an all-too-long hiatus with a dumpster find Compaq. My home net is strung together with a managed 48 port 1000base-T switch a trash picker friend found lying out for trash. It's sometimes quite comical what people discard.
Next level restoration for this machine. Not so much into Apple since those days when I used them regularly. Need more Linux as you say. The plasma spin video is awesome to get started. Thanks Rodney...Silicon Valley near life resident. From Hawaii.... K Bye.
I actually had one of these at one point. It wasnt very powerful, so I configured it as a thin client and made my home server handle all of the grunt. This was most ironic considering said home server was powered by a 3.2ghz Pentium 4, and so itself wasnt all that, but it was a damn sight faster than that poor old Mac.
I have two (bondi blue and, uh, blueberry? blue, the one with the 128mb Rage Pro card in it) that I need to do all this to. I have a ton of great software but neither drive works. Glad to see a refurb in action before I attempt rebuilds on these.
Computer so old even Louis Rossman won't fix. Jokes aside, on one hand it's sad people throw away perfectly functional computers but it's also understandable if it can only run ancient browsers like IE4. Would love to see if it can run a modern Linux distro
Linux distros for 32-bit PPC are starting to be pretty rare, but Adelie exists and might even perform decently for some tasks. Perhaps a bigger issue for super old machines is the hardware requirements of modern browsers, even much newer netbooks can be unbearably slow. Personally I think the best use for these things is installing OS9 to enjoy a wide selection of classic games, or if that doesn't interest you, the combination of a CRT and decent speakers makes for a surprisingly nice little DVD/CD player. It should also be noted that classic MacOS is super fast on these machines, you could totally use it for a variety of other non-online basic tasks too.
It was a great day when the computer lab at school got a bunch of iMacs. We immediately put a SNES emulator and proceeded to play obscure Gundam fighting games on it.
I still have my Bondi Blue iMac, just like this one. It was my first Mac, and the first machine I bought with my own money, some six months after release. It was working, but not booting (flashing question mark and no sound from the HDD) last time I tried, but SOMEHOW my cats managed to push it off the table where it was sitting and it fell, face down. Luckily, the monitor and external plastics seem to be intact, but the internal ones had become brittle with age, and I found many pieces rattling inside. Did a quick test after the fall, and now it won't chime or display an image, but the power LED comes on and the monitor seems to power up. Hope it is just a question of reseating boards inside. Fun fact: I'm a tech journalist with a career spanning almost 25 years. And the first article I ever published was a tutorial on how to install Linux PPC on this iMac.
Mr. Action Retro installed OpenBSD7 on one of these BondiBlue IMacs - he pushed it to modern times. He has thus breathed life back into the computer - which now functions in a contemporary manner with a modern operating system and a modern browser.
They're also easier to repair than the ones from just a year or so later, because at that point they cheaped out and started making the inner shell partly out of that awful cheap plastic that they loved back then instead of all metal like this one. No matter how you store them, they're going to get brittle and shatter under their own weight. I've heard that the MacEffects guy was looking for an intact inner shell to make a custom mold for replacement parts out of... judging by the lack of such a product on the site, I guess he's never found anyone who has one!
@@fazejohncenachristogamerfaze The newer slot loading models are actually a lot better for that, they have the drives and such directly accessible by just removing the bottom cover and RF shield. Getting to the CRT is still a disaster though. Apple's towers from this period though, now that's a whole another ball game. I have a graphite G4, and that has to be my favourite machine to work on, period.
They all came with them. I have installation restore discs from 76.9 to not sure a tiger or snow leopard or all the way up I have a bout 100 max I have about six or seven of these IMAX, including two of these that you found on the road just like I did but they had hard drives in them
I was hoping to pick up a few pointers. I’ve got a G3 Ruby from the same time period with a bad power supply. It worked great right up to the day it stopped. Lol. It’s been sitting on my list of stuff to fix for close to 6 years now... they just look like such a pain to take apart and reassemble, I keep putting it off...
That's the same old iMac I have...still works I think - been a couple years since I booted it. I think I did put some form of Linux on it also. Going to have to boot it up and see one of these days.
Do not mess with the CRT unless you know exactly what you're doing and have the proper tools to deal with the electricity stored in those things. It doesn't matter if it's off, those things will still hold a charge and can give you a nasty shock which could be lethal. Approach with extreme caution.
Hi, 1999 slot g3 worked great then was put in storage for 5 years took it out,fired it up and: startup sound ,cd rom sound but no sound from HD. Then finder icon and question mark folder icon.Hold down option on start up and no HD icon present.Pulled the Pram battery and it's toast.Question, do you think the Pram battery could cause this?
When you look up "pack rat" you will find me... Lol I stop and pickup anything electronic on the side of the road, sitting in a yard marked free. I even knock on the door and ask it thee is not a sign... I play electronic technician at my work bench for 20+ years repairing and fixing and even building electronic projects. So I take that old roadside stuff is a gold mine for parts. I use the parts I need after testing the parts. I have saved $1,000.00's of bucks doing this. If it is a working item, or needs something fixed it is added to the "Project List"... Lol That thing is like monster of it's own... I'm not a Mac person but I would be all over it if it was sitting beside the road for free... 🤣 Thanks for the video! LLAP 🖖
