In celebration of the iMac’s 10th birthday, The Sydney Morning Herald republished their article from May 16, 1998 on the release of the original Bondi Blue iMac.

It’s called iMac. The “i”, so the pony-tailed marketing types tell us, stands for “Internet, Individual, Instruct, Inform and Inspire”.

The article compared the iMac to bleeding-edge PCs of the time:

The G3 can out-gallop even a 400MHz Pentium II, according to the boffins. With a 4Gb hard drive, 32Mb of main memory and 2Mb of graphics RAM (both upgradable), 15-inch colour screen, 24 speed CD-ROM and built-in stereo speakers, the iMac is certainly no slouch.

And, like many of the initial reviews at the time, it made mention of the seemingly crazy decision not to include a floppy drive:

Finally, for the oddest of reasons, the iMac has no floppy drive. In eschewing what is a $5 component, Apple has robbed users of any way to back up their work and swap documents with friends, unless all your mates are on e-mail.

The benefit of hindsight makes the paragraph about the inclusion of USB, but no serial or printer ports quite hilarious:

To print from your iMac you’ll need to find a USB printer (don’t bother looking, right now there are none), buy a printer with infra-red capabilities (limiting your choice to a handful of models), be connected to a network (at home? yeah, right) or e-mail your work to someone who’s got a printer.