Last year, Pat Ruddin, a kind and tenacious colleague, passed away. Also a Macintosh aficionado, she kept this original Bondi Blue iMac in her office on a filing cabinet. When I came back from my sabbatical, it had made its way to my desk where I maintain the Retrocomputing at City Tech collection of vintage computers. It’s a prestigious addition to the collection, and a marvelous remembrance of Pat.
My first on-site job at NetlinkIP on St. Simons Island, Georgia was to go to a big, fancy house and setup their original iMac. Soon thereafter, my friend Chris Lee got an iMac, too. I think that I still had my Power Macintosh 8500 at that time. When I got a job at Mindspring in Atlanta, I upgraded to a Blue and White G3, which I later traded to Chris for a Dual G4 (this was a surprising and gracious offer that rekindled our friendship after drifting apart).
Pat’s iMac doesn’t boot up now, but I think it will make a great project for rejuvenation.
