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It only cost Michael MJD nearly $1,800, plus a replacement display controller, to get to the point where he could play the memory game on a classic iMac. (credit: Michael MJD / YouTube)
Two remarkable things appear in
a recent Michael MJD video
. One is an iMac G3 from 1999 that responds to not just touchscreen taps and drags, but also touch pressure. The other is a sticker on the side of the Strawberry tray-loading iMac, indicating that it was an "Engineering Prototype" from Elo, a company that was an official "Value Added Reseller" for Apple products.
The first iMac's release was
25 years ago last month
. The device was a breakthrough on many levels. The transparent brightly colored plastic, the streamlined shape with rounded corners, and the bold-for-the-time choice to forgo floppy drives and myriad other PC ports made the G3 a style icon, to the point where the G3 is
part of the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection
. It rebuilt and fortified Apple's position in the tech landscape. And, not for nothing, it kicked off an
era-defining surge in transparent design
.
Elo's touchscreen Mac was meant to work as a kiosk but survived until today to become a remarkable oddity.
The iMac G3 heralded some of Apple's future strategies and focus, but the company and its business model contained many aspects of an earlier era. Elo, a company that continues to make
touchscreens for point-of-sale systems
and other applications, turned some iMacs into touchscreen kiosks, with Apple's approval as a "Value Added Reseller." As Michael MJD points out in his video, the iMac made sense as a good-looking computer you could park on a surface and allow people to manipulate without a keyboard or mouse. What's more, Elo was only one of three known companies offering this kind of third-party touchscreen conversion.