Games - IMac

	Games - IMac

The iMac is a desktop personal computer designed and built by Apple Computer. It has been the consumer flagship of Apple's Macintosh range since 1998, and has evolved through three basic forms. It has been rated by Walt Mossberg as the “Gold Standard of desktop computing”.

The iMac has been a huge innovation that, along with the introduction of the iPod, has contributed to the recent dramatic increase in Apple Computer's profits and share price. Some credit the popularity of the USB devices to the iMac, as Windows PCs previously supported legacy ports, which reduced the incentive for third-party manufacturers to produce USB-compliant devices.

The machine enjoys a relatively high profile in popular culture due to its distinctive aesthetics and Apple's successful marketing. In 2006, it became the first Apple Macintosh desktop computer to ship with an Intel processor.

History

Steve Jobs streamlined the company’s large and confusing product lines immediately after becoming Apple’s interim CEO in 1997; towards the end of the year, Apple trimmed its line of desktop Macs down to the beige Power Macintosh G3 series. Having discontinued the consumer-targeted Performa series, Apple needed a replacement for the Performa’s price point. The company announced the iMac on May 7, 1998, and started shipping the iMac on August 15 of that year. The launch of the iMac was a landmark event for its time, and had a massive impact on both the company and the computer industry.

At the time, Apple was unique in producing all-in-one desktop computers, in which the CPU and the monitor are contained in one enclosure. Many other PC manufacturers have tried to imitate this, most of which have met with little success.

Aesthetically, the iMac was dramatically different from any other mainstream computer ever released. It was made of translucent “Bondi blue”-colored plastic, and was egg-shaped around a 15-inch (38 cm) CRT. There was a handle, and the computer interfaces were hidden behind a door that opened on the right-hand side of the machine. Two headphone jacks in the front complemented the built-in stereo speakers. Jonathan Ive, currently Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple, is credited with the industrial design. While appealing to neophytes with its distinct appearance, it rang the bells of nostalgia with its streamlined shape, strongly reminiscent of the classic Lear Siegler ADM-3A dumb terminals.

Legacy Macintosh peripheral connections, such as the ADB, SCSI, and GeoPort serial ports, were eliminated in favor of USB ports; the floppy drive was discarded (The first computer to do so). Although these were aging technologies, Apple’s move was considered ahead of its time and was hotly debated. For example, there was no analogous way to exchange small files with other existing machines, possibly requiring owners to buy an external USB floppy drive (the floppy drive sold well in the first few years of the iMac G3). Creating backup copies of files was slow over the USB 1.1 connection, which operates at 12 Mbit/s (1.5 MB/s). Purists felt that files should be transferred by network file-sharing or via email.

The iMac keyboard and mouse were redesigned with translucent plastics and a Bondi Blue trim. The keyboard was smaller than Apple’s previous keyboards, with white letters on black keys, both features that attracted debate. The mouse was of a round, "hockey puck" design, which was instantly derided as being unnecessarily difficult for users with larger hands and considered particularly reprehensible coming from Apple, the pioneer of the graphical user interface. Apple continued shipping the round mouse, adding a divot in later versions so that users could distinguish where the button was. Eventually, a new oblong optical mouse, known as the Apple Pro Mouse, replaced the round mouse across all of Apple’s hardware offerings. A redesigned version called the Apple Mouse was produced, with the side grips white and the tension control removed. On October 12, 2005, Apple replaced the one-button Mouse with the Mighty Mouse for the new iMac G5.

Technical

Internally, the iMac was a combination of the MacNC project and CHRP. Although the promise of CHRP has never been fully realized, the work that Apple had done on CHRP significantly helped in the designing of the iMac. The original iMac had a 233 MHz PowerPC G3 (PowerPC 750) chip, with 512 KB L2 cache running at 116.6 MHz, which also ran in Apple’s high-end Power Macintosh line at the time, though at higher speeds, with more expensive models shipping with 1MB L2 cache. It sold for US$1,299, and had a 4 GB hard drive, 32 MB RAM, 2 MB video RAM, and shipped with Mac OS 8.1, which was soon upgraded to Mac OS 8.5. Parts such as the front-mounted IrDA port and the tray-loading CD-ROM drive were borrowed from the Apple notebooks. Although the iMac did not officially have an expansion slot, the first versions had a slot dubbed the "mezzanine slot". It was only for internal use by Apple, although a few third-party expansion cards were released for it, including some CPU upgrades from Newer Technology and SCSI/SCSI-TV tuner cards (iProRAID and iProRAID TV) from the German company Formac; this was removed from later iMacs. According to an article in the German computer magazine c’t, the socket can be retrofitted on revision C iMacs.

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Games - IMac

History

Technical

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