I loved my G3 iMac. I was in elementary school around the time it came out and my father bought one for each of my sisters who went away to college and one for us at home. It was a fixture in our lives. From a user's perspective, the iMac G3 was the first computer that crossed the boundary from utility box to lifestyle machine.

The built in speakers were everything. I used to download music via Napster and play that music with my sisters over the land line. Computer speakers may have existed prior to the iMac but never were they highlighted as a core element of the computer's design.

I used to spend silly amounts of time in computer stores playing around with computers. I remember the time that the iMac G3 and G3 Tower started to hit the shelves and demo areas. It was a multi-sensory explosion. It's really, really hard to describe the impact that these computers had at the time.

Maybe the multi-sensory thing was the reason why the iMac experience is so deeply ingrained in my memory. It managed to touched on all five senses:

- Sight - it had bold, colorful design

- Touch - soft translucent plastic without a single hard edge

- Smell - remember the smell of a new Mac?

- Hearing - had great stereo speakers

- Taste - Apple was in it's "lickable" phase.. I miss it to this day!

I'll spare folks from more of this treacle because I don't want to completely re-write history. The computer wasn't perfect - it was terribly slow and tended to crash whenever my father would yell at me to stop using it.