That iMac I Saw
I was introduced to an iMac in 2003.
It was set up for demonstration purposes in a corner in Delhi Public School, Noida, where I had gone for a programming competition. There were no words I had for this device. It was … unusual. That’s an interesting word to have for something that was so gorgeously beautiful. To put it in perspective, the PC I had at that time was a clunky machine, clearly showing age. It was a worn out shade of white, or rather a faded out yellow, with the most dull looking exteriors, the kind that could induce slumber. So to me, the description of the iMac started with this word. Unusual.
I remember going up to it and admiring it. There was no box for a CPU. Everything was inside the monitor itself - the curvy translucent bluish monitor through which you could see the motherboard. I grabbed hold of the hockey-puck mouse, and tried to press the left and the right of it, because I knew how to work a mouse. Or rather, I thought I knew. There’s a left button and a right button on every mouse, right? Wrong. This mouse had just ONE button - and that button was the mouse itself. It was a unique experience, considering I had been using the PC for about 10 years without even thinking about the existence of some other system that was similar but still so fundamentally different. How could anyone not have a right mouse button?
I started using it, falling in love with the way the genie effect worked, the way the dock buttons bounced up when I hovered above them and simply by the way in which everything was smooth. I had read somewhere that it contained this amazing new technology called Quartz which was awesome at anti-aliasing and rendering 2D stuff, and it was just wonderful seeing it come alive in front of me for the first time. I was fascinated. However, at that point of time in my life, it was just too expensive a computer. It wasn’t that I didn’t dream about buying it, it was that I couldn’t.
7 years later, I have a MacBook Pro, an iPod nano and an iPhone. Something changed.
