Macs have had a very unique look for quite a long time. Not only do they look pretty, but their design certainly sticks around in your memory. For one, I can remember quite well when I used a Mac for the first time, but not with Windows, or a PC for that matter…

My first Mac experience was with an iMac in France, during the nineties. For some reason I had to go online to check my (insignificant) mail or something. You could try to find an internet café in France in 1999, but in those days the French were being too French to even try to bother about things like that. I wouldn’t blame them though, when you’re living in a beautiful maison between the lavender fields of the Provence, the last thing you should be thinking about is checking your e-mail.

But somehow I managed to find some kind of internet access point, completely by mistake. I think it was in a mall in Avigniceorange….or something along the lines of that. It was a first gen. iMac, modified by France Telecom (the national telecom company in France). Why was it modified, you ask? Well, as these were the nineties, things like broadband internet and mobile phones weren’t really things used by the average Joe, so this access point went online using the 56k modem the iMac had. And, as you might remember from the old days: You had to pay per usage back then.
So what these bright people from France Telecom did, is smack an enormous white contraption on the front of the Mac, with a telephone card reader down on the front. This way, you could go online with the remaining credit on the card. When the card was empty (which happened in no time) the system would kick you out of the browser.

This is the only photo I could find of these things, because they’re basically extinct right now…

As you can see, it was quite hard to even recognize the Mac itself behind the white monstrosity France Telecom had devised for this. But somehow I just knew it was a Mac. Maybe it was the OS 9 interface that gave it away. It certainly didn’t look like Windows. For one, it had this strange blue wallpaper with smiling squares on it, weird…

Anywho, you might wonder if I liked working on the iMac. Well no, not really. As this was in France, the iMac had one of those horrible Azerty keyboards. I mean yes I could check my e-mail, but try writing on those things! It took me 15 minutes to even enter hotmail.com in the address bar! And when you actually managed to go write an e-mail while meticulously trying to find the question mark key, you’ll be spontaneously kicked out the browser, because you hadn’t got any credits left on your telephone card, which meant that you had to go out and buy a new one, and start all over again!!

Seriously, it was the most agonizing way to go online. But then again, it could have been part of some elaborate scheme of the French to force tourists to enjoy their vacation even more (and spend more money), by making all internet access points very unattractive to use…

Who knows?