Biography | Steve Jobs — He Unveiled a Bondi Blue All-in-One in the Hall That Had Heard the Macintosh

On 6 May 1998 Steve Jobs, then Apple's interim chief executive, walked onto the stage of the Flint Center at De Anza College in a suit.

Fourteen years earlier, in this same hall, he had taken the first Macintosh out of a bag.

This morning the object under the cloth was translucent.

The machine was called iMac.

It was Bondi Blue, named for the water off an Australian beach, with a 15-inch display, a 233 MHz PowerPC G3, 32 megabytes of memory, a 4-gigabyte disk, and no floppy drive.

The price was $1,299.

Shipment was set for August.

Apple's own release that day called it the Internet-age computer for the rest of us.

Jobs had come back to Apple in 1997 to a company that had left the low-end consumer market and was running out of money and ideas.

The iMac was the first new consumer desktop of that return, designed by Jony Ive's group as a single object you could carry by a handle.

USB replaced the old ports.

Critics called the hockey-puck mouse a mistake and the colours a toy.

Buyers did not wait for the argument to settle.

The Flint Center opened in 1971 as a civic and campus hall.

The Foothill-De Anza board voted on 10 June 2019 to close it after repair estimates topped $49 million.

Demolition began in October 2024.

What stands at the pin today is a cleared site off Stevens Creek Boulevard, with the Flint Center parking garage still to the west and still carrying the name.

The 1984 Macintosh morning is already pinned here as a technology-history memory.

This one is the morning the company came back to the same room with a consumer computer that did not look like a beige box.

Cover: the Flint Center before demolition.

The second photograph is an original Bondi Blue iMac G3.

Photos: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0; Stephen Hackett, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.