Today is the 20th anniversary of the iMac.  Those gumdrop coloured balls of joy that brought the Mac back to being trendy.  I don’t remember when I saw my first one – probably the blueberry one that my Dad bought for his print shop.  But I remember seeing a Blue Dalmation iMac on a trip to Vancouver, and it was absolutely eye-catching.  I remember stopping on the sidewalk and staring into a store window with my jaw somewhere near the sidewalk.

I used to go to the office with my Dad after supper.  He had work he wanted to do.  I wanted to read Star Trek fanfic on the iMac – it’s 56k modem was screaming fast, and Internet Explorer didn’t crash under the weight of the stories I was reading.  I had a Classic II in my bedroom, but it’s 4 MB of memory had trouble handling really long webpages.

Twenty years ago, those of us who used the Mac were still in the ‘little bit insane’ category.  I grew up in a Mac household, because my family was in printing, and I caught grief on it from my friends.  I couldn’t play the games they could play.  My browser couldn’t load the same websites.  When I started getting into coding, nobody else really knew what Hypercard was and why it was so cool.  So I went online and found friends who cared about the same computer I cared about.

The iMac always struck me as a powerful computer.