While I was online looking for some docks for my iPhone 4 and iPads, I happened across this little gem from 1998. It’s an in-store demo CD for the iMac G3. Since there were no Apple Stores in 1998, this must have been sent to Authorized Apple Resellers. Back in the day, Apple used to sell their Macs in places like CompUSA and Sears. Since they rarely (if ever) had trained employees, the Macs were sort of left to sell themselves. Even places like CompuUSA, where you’d think the employees would know a thing or two about Macs, seldom knew the difference between a G4 Cube and an espresso maker.

That being the case, I imagine that these CDs are pretty rare. I almost felt bad opening it.









I popped the CD into my iMac G3 and let the installer do its thing.



The system requirements state “Mac OS 8 or greater”.



Once the demo is installed, you have to reboot the iMac. Once you do, it immediately starts the demo. Pressing cmd-q will get you out of it. Like a screensaver, it will then autostart after a few minutes. In order to disable it, you have to run the “QUITlauncher” file that came bundled with the installer.



It’s a pretty snazzy demo, much better than the slideshow of images that was on the OS X demo CD I have. It plays a nice fullscreen video, and jumps to a menu when you click the mouse.



I pulled the video out of the bundle so you can check it out:



Here’s the menu you get when you click the mouse:



Clicking each menu option brings you to a submenu, using a nice little animation. It’s very well done for something from 1998. Back in the day, I couldn’t imagine ever making something like this demo with the likes of Windows 98. I would probably have been sold on the iMac because of the demo alone, never mind the iMac itself.





Clicking “Bundled Applications” drills down to more submenus:









Back on the top-level Software menu, clicking “Lots More” shows a little video….



Continuing with the top-level menu:



Clicking “The PowerPC G3” link brings up another screen with a little animation. The snails and the rabbit move across the display.



The Ease of Use menu has a three and a half minute video illustrating how easy it is to set up and iMac, as compared to a PC.



I’d love to embed the whole video so you can download it, but is’s almost 200 Megs. I had to do a fair amount of compressing to shrink it down, and it’s still 60 Megs. In addition, Flickr only allows 90 seconds of video. Besides, they’d probably yank the whole video over some copyright BS anyway. There might be a little loss in quality, but at least you’ll get the point.



And lastly, Peripherals…



If you quit the launcher, you can quickly restart it by pressing the “Demo” button on the bottom right of the display. Or, just wait a few minutes and it’ll kick in like a screensaver.



Very nice.

I love these demo CDs. I can’t wait to track down the one for my G4 Cube.