It's been a while, I KNOW! I live in a 500sqft apartment, so hauling out the iMac to work on it is such an ordeal. I haven't touched it in a long time, unfortunately.

Recently, however, I went to a nearby movie rental store (yes, my city has one!) and rented the first 4 episodes of Serial Experiments Lain on DVD, and I thought it would be really fun to watch this late 90s anime on my late 90s iMac! I knew from prior experience, though, that the disc drive installed on the computer already only took CD-Rs, not DVDs of any kind. I wondered if it was even possible to play DVDs on this iMac.

Basically, the answer...is no. I went to Reddit (usually my Reddit account remains private, but I can trust y'all, right?) on r/VintageApple and asked my question there; at first, things seemed kind of hopeful! The resounding answer was "maybe, but if it does, you'll need an external player." Luckily I have one already for my stupid Macbook laptop that didn't come with a CD player -_-, so I hooked it up to my iMac.

It didn't even recognize that it existed. Bummer.

I had one hopeful moment when, in desperation, I hooked the player USB up to the iMac keyboard, and it popped up with a message that was something like, "There's not enough power to run this device." But no matter what I unplugged or rearranged, either that error came up or nothing happened at all.

As I continue learning over and over again, my iMac must've been the first goddamn computer out of the factory in 1998, because it lacks almost all of the features later iMac G3s had in '99 and 2000. I'm pretty sure at this point that multiple specs are keeping me from playing movies on this computer:

1. My iMac has USB 1.1 ports, which are all but obsolete now. My external DVD player definitely doesn't have a USB connector compatible with 1.1 ports.
2. Even if I could find a player compatible with 1.1 (expensive!), my iMac likely doesn't have the bandwidth to support video playback. Even if I could get it to work, the movie would be so choppy and laggy it would be veritably pointless.
3. As already stated, my iMac was, like, the first one ever created, and did not come equipped with the processing power (you need at least 400mhz to be able to play movies, apparently) or the hardware for this use. She's too old and new at the same time T_T

Yeah. It's just not happening. If I was more ambitious, perhaps, I could modify the hardware enough to figure it out, but that sounds like more hassle than it's worth, and there's no guarantee it would even result in anything actually watchable. So I'm back to square one in figuring out how to actually use this iMac: get more RAM so I can finally download Sims.

I made another Reddit post asking about the type of RAM stick I should buy, but all the answers feel so chock-full tech-speak (技術的な言葉だらけ, as we'd say it in Japanese) that they are nigh impenetrable for someone like me. I'll probably show the thread to my dad when I go home for Christmas this December. Once that is settled, I hope to be able to use the iMac more often! She really deserves better orz.

My first "entry" here! Hello! I'll start from the beginning, I suppose...

I've loved these computers ever since I realized they existed. I was born in 2000, so I wasn't actually "around" when these were actively on the market, so I didn't find out about them until later in life when I ran into one at an old used electronics store in Texas. I remember being intrigued by it, but of course I wasn't going to ask my Dad to buy a whole computer, so we moved on, and the computer faded to the back of my mind.

I went through middle and high school not giving much thought to these computers, but in college, I began to get nostalgic. So I did what every early-20s person does when they get nostalgic: I started to yearn for an era I'd only tangentially been a part of! This included the late-'90s, early-'00s "blobjects", of which the iMac G3 is literally a poster child.

So, after a stint of just posting iMacs on tumblr, a few months into my post-college job, I started idly scouring eBay for listings, and wouldn't you know, I found one listed for, like, $380 I think? I bid $300, and won. I now think I might have overpaid a bit, but I don't care that much--I got an iMac G3!! Something I thought would take me years to figure out how to buy, save up for, etc., I got at the age of 22. It felt great.

The computer arrived on January 22nd, 2023, and I had a wonderful evening putting it together and sorting through the plethora of papers given to me by the seller; papers about how to use a computer, how to buy a connection to the capital I Internet, a card where I could register my iMac to Apple and get tech support...all of this stuff, this stuff that, to me, was like gazing into a distant, distant past. I never had any of these things, never experienced them, so to see physical proof that people had to "sign up" for the Internet was fascinating.

After much trial and error and more than a few damaged CDs (because that's the only way to transfer files from my modern laptop to the iMac, and I'm relying entirely on Internet uploads of old files for this iMac), I finally achieved my first goal--download Sims 1 on my iMac! Unfortunately, I still can't actually...play it. I don't have enough storage, or RAM, or whatever it's called. (If you can explain these concepts to me in terms of the iMac, please do. Message me on my Neocities profile or something, seriously.)

So that's where I stand as of right now! I've been unsure how to proceed with the problem of only having 32gb of storage/RAM/whatever on the computer, so I've been frozen since February. I'm hoping starting this "blog" will motivate me to finally kick this thing off in a real way and actually use it. For now, though, it's a pretty sweet piece of decor in my living room, lol!

Anyway here's a picture of some specs, lol: