Spinning stuff and nifty speakers
While the RAM upgrades — both video and system — on the Bondi Blue are straightforward, upgrading the hard drive is less straightforward. But it's doable — especially if you're not lumbered with XXL hands, as is yours truly.
Four-thousand, three-hundred, and eleven megabytes — and each one well-appreciated (click to enlarge)
With only 4.3GB of space to work with, upgrading your Bondi Blue's hard drive was certainly welcome. However, because the iMac's ATA implementation doesn't support 48-bit logical block addressing, you're limited to hard drives of 137GB or under.
According to the venerable LowEndMac, you can also upgrade a Bondi's CD-ROM drive to a CD-RW drive. I've never seen a DVD-ROM upgrade for tray-loading CD-ROM iMacs such as the Bondi Blue, but that certainly doesn't mean they don't exist. I don't get out much.
Yes, Virginia, there was a time when all optical drives were tray-loaders (click to enlarge)
Before we crack open our Bondi Blue to take a look at its bulky, dangerous, and archaic CRT display, let's take another look at those cables that I unhooked right before I slid out the system tray:
The iMac's bottom, sans system tray (click to enlarge)
The one in the center is an eight-pin mini-DIN RS-232/RS-422 cable — which makes sense, seeing as how it snakes around the side of the CRT display and hooks up to the iMac's front-mounted infrared sensor:
A plastic speaker enclosure boosts bass (click to enlarge)
What is interesting about the photograph of that cable's destination, however, isn't the silver rectangular infrared-sensor unit to which it connects. Of greater interest is the translucent chamber with a curved top to the sensor's right, inside of which you can see a translucent tube.
That unit is a pint-sized speaker enclosure for the iMac's SRS stereo sound system, and the tube-within-a-box setup is essentially a bass-reflex system, but with the porting happening in the back end of the enclosure and not the front.
The iMac had a deservedly good reputation for decent sound despite its speakers' size. That little translucent box is one reason why.
Next page: The display of death
COMMENTS
Sooo close
You so nearly got through without your inner fanboi escaping but fluffed it at the end:
"I'm surrounded by the guts of the personal computer that saved Apple, arguably jump-started the internet age, helped kill off the floppy, and brought translucency to everything from George Foreman grills to Rowenta Surfline steam irons."
Jump-started the internet age? My arse. I'd love to see any accurate statistics you may have for the number of people who first experienced the internet or first had the internet at home on an iMac. I'd be prepared to make a healthy wager that the true figure is vanishingly small.
Helped kill off the floppy I can't really sit still for either. Yes it helped but so did about a billion other factors. Claiming the iMac was significant is like trying to take credit for keeping the worlds trees alive because *I* produce CO2. The iMac is way down the list behind CD-R, CD-RW, freefalling drive prices, USB memory sticks, software bloat etc.
You probably deliberately left out the 'i'. We're into our second decade of marketing wonks insisting that anything can be cool if you put an 'i' in front of it. Shoot them, shoot them all.
Translucent everything - oh yes, that's thanks to the iMac for sure which is a marmite thing in itself but you should have highlighted the bigger truth I'd credit the iMac with. It started a revolution in design. We see attempts at aesthetically pleasing design in the most mundane of items these days from cheap radios to phones to, well, you name it. Nothing in a poorly designed or plain beige box stands a prayer. Much as I dislike Apple the iMac deserves a beer for that so here's one.
@Christian Berger re: 56k
It's all comparative.
If you had moved up from 1200/75b/s, through V.22bis, V.32 and V.32bis, then V.90 was fast.
If you were using it for commercial use, then it was almost certainly the upload speed that was your issue, as it was asymmetric and the upload channel was a fraction of the download speed. IIRC, if you did V.90 modem to V.90 modem directly, you could only get 33.6kb/s anyway. You needed something like a DS0 setup, which could directly inject digital signals into the phone system, to give you the 56k download speed to end-users.
Most home users mostly downloaded data, so this was not a big issue.
Don't compare your 20Mb/s ADSL line, or even channel-bonded ISDN with what home users had available at the time, because ISDN was far too expensive for home users to consider, even the 'reduced-cost' Home Highway that BT tried to sell.
At this time, nobody did large mail attachments or video, and you left P2P running for hours or days if you were using it. Web sites were still mainly HTML, with only fairly small GIF images. You also did not have flash video adverts or java or javascript apps at all. Most pages were fairly static, and eminently cachable, so we got what we though was a good service at the time.
I wan my whole household (several computers with thin-wire Ethernet, and then wireless as it became available - we're a techie household) on a dial-on-demand 56K modem for several years, until BT got round to upgrading our exchange to ADSL.
Best Selling?
The best-selling computer of all time is the Commodore 64 - by a significant amount.
There's a tendency amongst both Apple execs and fans to re-write history in their favour - Commodore had the best-selling computer ever with the 64, and the first colour DTP machine with the Amiga.
Win95
I'm sure we all remember Bill Gates' and his hilarious on-stage USB "demonstration".
Whatever the bitter and twisted anti-Apple-tards might post in these articles, Apples resurgence redefined the PC industry - and that's why *every* major tech company is now scrambling to keep up with them.
A pint for Mr Jobs.
@Andy Christ
Windows 95 shipped with MSN preinstalled and I daresay other PCs shipped with AOL or other apps preinstalled. So a good few PCs doubtless existed way before your "first personal computer to ship that was ready to connect to the internet in seconds" that did exactly that.
Of course maybe Apple bragged they were the first, but it wouldn't be the first time they made baldfaced lies in ads. See also claims about the Mac being the first 64-bit OS, the fastest PC ever etc.
