'The agonizing road to Macness' is our bi-weekly editorial. Wouter writes about his experiences about Macs and other related stuff, during his grand quest of actually buying an iMac.

For a long time, I wasn’t really interested in Macs. Especially during the nineties. When I was about 10 years old, I already knew Macs were some weird kind of PC, which can’t run Windows and it didn’t even have Pentium II! Everybody knew your PC had to have Pentium II! Never mind that I hadn’t got the slightest idea what a Pentium II exactly was, you knew it was somehow better than a normal Pentium, so you needed to have it, like now. Nobody was even aware of Macs as a real alternative to Windows PCs back then.

The first iMacs did look pretty though. I remember seeing the single commercial which Apple ever aired on Dutch TV, where first gen iMacs seemed to dance around in circles on the screen on ‘She’s like a rainbow’ from the Rolling Stones. The iMacs looked so much better than the huge grey contraptions we had on our desks during the day. But still: No Windows. In 1997, most people used their PCs mostly for their work, and to do their work they needed the same operating system they used at their office, which was Windows. Another turnoff was the lack of a floppy drive in the iMac. Floppy disks were the memory sticks of the day, and those elitist snobs at Apple completely omitted a floppy drive, and instead came with something called a ‘CD-ROM’ player, and ‘USB ports’…What the hell is USB?
Maybe they were a bit too much ahead of their time when they introduced the first iMac. But they certainly knew what kind of technologies were going to be big in the future.

Anyway, it took quite a while for Macs to get even noticed around here in Holland. Even if I wanted a Mac in 1999, it was quite hard to even find a place which would sell them. But a lot has changed during the last decade, and Macs have become much more significant during this time. Though they still managed to keep their underdog status in the entire market, which is mostly due their astronomical price tags, and of course: still no Windows. Well, for the avarge Joe who doesn't know how to use Bootcamp that is...