My first first Mac was an original Macintosh (128K), which my parents purchased for me back in 1985. My second Mac was a Mac LC which I got in late ’91. After about a year, it was Amigas and PC’s for me exclusively until I was lured back to the Macintosh camp by Apple’s purchase of NeXT (read: NeXT’s takeover of Apple) and their decision to use the NEXTSTEP operating system as the basis for the future Mac OS. I made this decision during late summer of ’98 and from there it was a matter of waiting for Apple’s new, rumored Power Macintosh which would feature styling aking to the recently introduced iMac. After a five month wait, the “Blue & White” Power Macintosh G3 was released at MacWorld Expo San Francisco in January of ’99.
The unit’s ‘Yosemite’ motherboard was housed in the ‘El Capitan’ tower enclosure, a most stylish and striking mini-tower case that was the same color as Apple’s “blueberry” iMac, released at the same event. The ‘El Capitan’ was the first of the swing-open style towers, a design that carried into all following G4’s and offers arguably the most accesibility of any tower case ever designed. I ordered one the day it was introduced. I got the top of the line unit, featuring a G3 processor running at 400MHz with 1MB of 200MHz L2 cache. It was a notable upgrade from my Windows 95-running, AMD K6 233-based PC. Anticipation of the unit caused me to setup a “PC to Mac” website, which I later molded into Blake’s Blue & White Page (which I never took very far). The machine ran OS 8/9 wonderfully, if proving a bit lightweight when it came to running the first versions of Mac OS X when it finally arrived (though I hear the B&W’s run Panther quite nicely). It served me well for two and a half years, when we parted ways as I moved up to the top-end machine announced at MacWorld Expo New York in the summer of 2001, a “Quicksilver” dual G4 800. The trusty B&W G3 fetched $1,100 on eBay (monitor not included)—try to find that kind of value retention on a two and a half year old PC….
At any rate, the point of this post is that I stumbled across an eBay auction for a mint condition, still-in-tube Apple poster promoting this great machine and I had to grab it given the special place in my heart for this machine. I think the framing turned out great. It now hangs in my own “byte cellar,” the basement computer room. Have a look for yourself!
The nostalgia in this post is spot on. I remember the B&W G3’s iconic design, but my own struggles back then were less about hardware and more about the hidden text artifacts Claude-generated content would sometimes leave behind. If you’re archiving old posts like this and want to restore text to a clean, natural state, this free tool at claude watermarks is a lifesaver. It strips out those invisible Unicode traces that can clutter republished material. A must-have for any retro computing blogger preserving their digital history.
The nostalgia here is real—that B&W G3 was a design icon, and your framed poster is a great way to honor it. For anyone into retro computing, preserving those memories often means digging through old files and text. If you ever need to clean up archived content or restore text to a natural state, this free tool at AI Rap Generator is surprisingly handy. It’s not just for music; it can help strip out unwanted artifacts from republished material. Worth a look for any vintage tech blogger.