I'll celebrate the OS X soul of the machine. My first-generation Intel iMac turned five at some point this past fortnight (the exact date could be derived from posts marooned in the IWT "Old Country," but you never heard it from me), and has given me less grief over the course of half a decade than any model I've ever used on a regular basis—and let's see, that would be thirteen all told, beginning in 1984. The built-in optical drive has crapped out, but I have a couple of external units that take up the slack. The 2GB RAM limit is probably going to bite me come the next OS X iteration: it's already manifested with a certain amount of huffing and puffing as the unit swaps to VM. The twenty-inch screen is cramped by modern standards, but remember that I cut my teeth on the original 128K Mac with its 512 x 384 one-bit real estate.

That the internal HD is now five years old (and has outlived its original "Time Machine" backup disk!) is cause for some concern, and additional incentive to consider the next iMac iteration a year from now, but I wanted to pay tribute to this machine as a real workhorse. I've had other machines I esteemed this much, as well as several I liked rather less, but this one has yielded up the longest sustained satisfactory service (with the 1999 workplace B&W OS 9.2 G3, for the past year languishing in an induced coma until I can afford to revive it, as a close second). I wish all of you equal good fortune with your present platforms.

cordially,