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The iMac's 10th birthday is here! Just 10 years, but look at how much the personal computer has changed, and how much the iMac has changed it. It's fascinating to look back at the press that followed 1998's surprise introduction of the original Bondi blue iMac, the all-in-one unit that quipped "Sorry, no beige" and exhorted us to "Think different". What really stands out in people's reactions is just how difficult a task "think different" was for Apple's audience.

Take a read of this review from the Sidney Morning Herald, from May 16, 1998. It's a very positive review, with some reservations – the first of which, price, is a valid topic in any time and place. But look at what else gives the newspaper pause:

It will ship with built-in networking (great if this was a built-for-business bMac or a network computer nMac, but a curious inclusion for homes and quite a slab of the educational market).

Networking? Yes, that was some techie / enterprise-y thing back in the day. Seems just amazing, doesn't it? There's more:

Expandability, for instance: the iMac has no internal slots into which cards can be fitted to increase its capabilities, although it's true that a lot of people don't add to their PC if it comes multimedia- and Internet-ready out of the box.

Expandability was and still is an issue for a small number of would-be buyers; no surprise there. "Internet-ready"? It's a long-dead phrase, of course, but most of us should recall 1998 as a year when Internet-ready wasn't a given; after all, that's what the "i" in "iMac" was boasting. But "multimedia-ready" - yeah, it's easy to forget that one, but 10 years ago people were still buying (non-Mac) computers for which CD-ROM players, or even sound, was an option!

There's no SCSI, inside or out... Nor does the iMac have any sockets for connecting external devices, bar a pair of Universal Serial Bus ports... At the moment there's nothing but a handful of scanners, mice and digital cameras sporting USB connections...

"Just" USB? Yes, that was a shocker for the time. And what's SCSI, you ask? If you're too young to know, ask someone with a neck beard. Or better yet, don't ask. It'll never matter again.

Also missing are serial ports (iMac owners can forget about using a PalmPilot or other hand-held which requires a serial desktop connection) and a printer port. 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.

"Connected to a network – at home? Right, what do you live in, the Pentagon?" Ah, if those 1998ers could see the wildly - and probably wirelessly - networked home of 2008!

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.

If you remember the first iMac at all, you remember the floppy panic: "Oh my god! No floppy disk? How will anybody back up or transfer anything?" Again, that "i" contained a hint (and USB stepped into the role big-time as well), but at the time it seemed that alone among all of humanity, only Cupertino could see beyond a life reliant on clunky plastic-and-metal disks holding a meager 1.4 MB of data.

The iMac is certainly going to turn the heads of shoppers. Sales reps will make a beeline for schools and even small businesses, where the in-built networking makes plenty of sense. It'll be good for the Internet, provided the soft modem is bumped up to 56Kbps - and this model will blitz the latest games.

But in every one of these equations buyers will come back to the lack of removable storage, the USB-only connectivity, the limited amount of software offered on the Mac platform compared with Windows 95, and, chiefly, the price.

There you have it. It's been just 10 years, yet the talk around the iMac was truly from another century: "We need serial ports and SCSI!" and "USB? No one uses that!" and "But how can it be a computer without a floppy drive?" and "You can't expect everyone to have email!"...

Wow, what a change in 10 years, and what a huge push the iMac gave us all in getting there. With the iMac and with its own corporate reinvention, Apple scored a huge success in both predicting the future of computing, and in creating the change it predicted.

Happy Birthday, Bondi! Let's have some cake, and think about what computing assumptions of today are going to have people laughing in 10 years. ("Get this: they thought Windows would own the computer market forever! Funny!" "Ha, what rubes they were... Uh, what's Windows?")