@@SuikaIbuki The whole carbon footprint thing is a joke anyways. If you look at human civilization and developments in tech, people take up less energy for many things already and our pollution output is significantly smaller. LED lights, smaller high-compression engines, more efficient computers, catalytic converters, DEF systems on diesel motors, etc. We don't need to spend money for some fictional political reasons to offset what we're doing.
Hey, I run a healthcare startup, that patients can be seen at home 100% and labs, tests and medications can all be delivered. It is all powered by AI and reduces your carbon foot print by eliminating any need to drive to care. Want to be part of meaningful change, let’s talk!
@@sbrazenor2 Came here to say the same thing. The whole Wren thing is such hollow nonsense and creators peddling the narrative of "your personal carbon footprint" are jokes. Stop hounding people who can control jack when it comes to emissions, and demand change from the corporations who cause the most emissions while benefitting from the carbon footprint narrative
I had one of those Molar Macs and like a fool got rid of it many years ago. That is one of Apples best computers ever made. Although ugly, the potential for upgrades made it a beast and the ability to easily repair it, makes it legendary :)
Yes, you are correct. I have always wanted one to add to my collection. Back in the day, I wanted to buy the version with the Zip disk drive and using its three (3) open PCI slots add a two port USB "A card and a two port Fire-wire 400 card (smile...smile).
@@transitengineer I had a full list of upgrades in mine and used it till 2010 as a daily driver. By the time I retired it, I had a DVD / CD Super Drive, USB Multi Card Reader, 1.44 Floppy, Built-in KB / Monitor Switch & RCA Switch for the personality card, X86 Mini PC = Hooked to the personality card & KB / Monitor Switch, USB / Firewire Card, Sata Card, ATI Radeon 9200 128MB PCI, 400 Mhz G3 Processor Upgrade, 768MB Ram, 250gb 2.5" IDE HD, sata 250gb 2.5" HD. Lastly I has a Global Village 28.8K Speaker phone modem plugged into my personality card, loaded with mega phone. Externally I had a Zip Drive (SCSI) & a VSE Super Disk Drive. Nothing I have seen has come close to that system since and I really miss it. Good memories, for that Mac :)
We had a few of these at my school, where they were used as teacher's computers in classrooms. The computer labs had lots of Power Macintosh 5200s, but they eventually upgraded them to iMacs before going all-Windows with, swear to god, a bunch of those "never obsolete!" eMachines. Two steps forward, three steps back.
We had a whole bunch of these in the music room as a kid, but we never actually used them. This was around 2005-2009ish, no clue where they are now. Wasn't able to identify them for years until I saw a picture of these randomly one day on my Facebook feed.
Back in the 2000s, some friends found several Molar Macs in a dumpster behind a school in the suburbs of Chicago. They brought them into our screen printing shop and we got them all running! They gave me one as a thank you gift for helping, and I actually used it in our graphics workflow for several years to convert files from pixel to vector files.
It's time for the beige G3s to fulfill their destiny and run Mac OSX. Looking forward to that video as it's something I've wanted to do when I get one of these.
VGA is 5 signals, RGB, HS, VS, plus a whole lot of grounding for clean signalling. 10 pins implies it's likely VGA, but knowing apple they might have shoved a side channel to talk to the display for the fancy control of the brightness and positioning in there. 5 mins with a scope could figure out if the display signals are VGA, if so you could likely get the monitor showing a picture, just without control of brightness. (unless they're crazy enough to be doing that on the VGA card)
VGA supports monitor control over DDC/CI and this was actually pretty well supported on many PCs. However the G3 is a bit too old for that. It's probably similar though.
My favorite use for my Molar is as a bridge device. It’s a great little complete package that lets me easily make floppies for my 512k as well as other 68k Macs
@@jessihawkins9116 yes but if it’s a 400k disk image it will still work. As long as the disk image is 400k it will write to the single side of an 800k disk and will still be readable. 800k floopies can also be formatted to 400k
@@DontGetHit648 yes but not with a SuperDrive. It will read those disks but not write them. You will need something like a Mac Plus to make your 128k/512k and Mac XL/Lisa images
@@jessihawkins9116 what do you mean “not with a super drive”? I’ve made 400k disks on my molar Mac that work in 400k drives and 800k drives using 800k floppies. I don’t have any spare 400k disks to see if those work but those are so hard to even get it doesn’t really matter
8:05 - The person who designed it loved cats. It's the perfect shape or a cat sleep on, and all the heat from the computer comes up through the vents to keep the kitty nice and toasty.
I had one! Upgrded it with Sony CDRW, larger HDD, and maxed the RAM. Worked great dual booting OS 9.2 and 10.2. With ADB, SCSI, and adding USB it could do anything. I miss that thing but I don't miss moving it.
Heh, I remember that when these were introduced there was a lot of demand for them to be sold to home users and not just to schools; Apple actually released a statement that ( *very* paraphrased) “ _we’ve heard your interest, and we’ll introducing something we think you’ll like later in the year…_ “
I was insanely fortunate to see these when they were in their prime: Back in the 2002-2003 school year I helped the CompSci teacher oversee the lab and there was a pretty even split between the G3 AIOs, the Power Mac 5200s, and the iMac G3 slot loaders. Never used them much, unfortunately, but they were there and they were interesting looking. Actually ended up getting one with what appeared to be a failed flyback from the one and only Garth Beagle, but CRT stuff is kinda outside my pay grade and research suggested that even with the proper flyback it'd still need some fine tuning which...yeah. Ended up handing it off to a friend who knows this stuff way better than I do.
Yes, I have always wanted one in my collection to join with my All-in-One 5500. Back in the day, I would have selected the model with the built-in Zip drive and for its three (3) open PCI slots would have added a two port USB "A" card and a two port Fire-wire 400 card (smile...smile).
I *did* have the privilege of seeing and using one back in the day, if only briefly, and in my own home! My dad was a systems engineer for an Apple Education Reseller and he would often bring home machines to try out. The G3 AIO was no exception. I still remember it sitting on the desk, being almost too big to fit on it. We grew up with a Mac Classic, and used LC 575's at school so I was always fascinated with AIO machines. The fact that this one was so expandable kinda blew my mind, even if the design wasn't the best. I can't remember how long we had it for -- it probably wouldn't have been very long. Within the next year we saw an original iMac and a B&W G3, which stuck around a bit longer, and allowing for some fun network gaming with Carmageddon, Age of Empires, Dark Vengeance, etc.
i dont think it would be hard to find the service manual for it and find the pinout for the internal video connector pinout then make a vga cable adapter for it. But there is another issue is how the new card can control the settings for the monitor unless you use the pins for the rgb input only.
Well Sean I see your still holding Steve captive LOL That is one crazy heavy looking G3 Mac very curious about what kind of upgrades you can throw in that thing
Believe it or not, my mother who was a school teacher, bought four of these for her small business. I remember seeing four of them in her house at one time.
I have always loved these All-in-One G3 desktop computers. They were the prefect upgrade to my first Apple computer an All-in-One 5400 (smile...smile).
My 6th grade teacher had a PowerMac 5400 in the classroom, I don't think the students were allowed to use it, but the school did buy a bunch of the iMac G3's in blue for the computer labs. I don't like Macs, but the sight of these classic machines brings me back to a better time of my youth.
I have always liked this AIO design. It's unusual and off putting. Congrats on the find. I have the G3 tower, and the desktop, but this one is still missing from my collection. Need new faceplates for the tower though. Some part of it broke.
IIRC these " Molar Mac " systems use a VGA signal for the internal display but it uses special hardware and software to do it. That said with a Mac compatible VGA card you should be able to make it work with a little bit of tinkering.
I have one of these I was given to by a school I was doing some work at in 2003, fprgot I even had it until I went into the crawl space under my steps to do some electrical work. I am going to get it going again eventually , vids like this one serve me with 2 things , a kick in the ass to get me going on it , and gives me valuable info on the internals , thanks tons and I have subscribed to keep an eye on your progress on it
My eletemtary school had one molar mac plus a bunch of older macs but i remember playing games on ie in os 9 man what a blast that it was. Kid pix deluxe as well back in 2004 or 2003 give or take
While I don’t know for certain, given that the internal display is a CRT, that header on the personality card is almost certainly RGBHV (“VGA”). You’d need a test pattern on the Mac and an oscilloscope to verify. You could probably desolder the DE15 connector on a newer video card and solder a header adapter.
I have one of these. I only gave it a few modest upgrades like a 400MHz processor, 6MB of VRAM, Zip drive, and the AV card. Some of the early AV cards have the requisite connectors to work in these, but none of the DVD cards do. I don't think anybody has found a way to get upgraded video to the internal screen without a lot of hackery and some lost features (notably display geometry and brightness control). These have a lot of the same problems of other CRT-based Apple products of the era, namely: cracked solder joints on the HV circuits. You may have to touch those up, especially around the flyback.
The way we cleaned the cases of machines that came in for repair at the Apple authorized repair center I used to work at was to use lemon extract from a bakery supply company. We bought it in gallon bottles. The citrus terpenes plus the alcohol cleaned things right up and left the repair lemony fresh.... actually the smell went away from the case right away but the shop was left lemony fresh.
I remember my middle school got the iMac g3 in red and they had the At Ease on them. Basically was to keep us from exploring around the hard drive, a bummer at the time. Would have loved to see one of these but they went with the iMac.
seeing these with the two headphone out ports gives me a vague memory... I'm not sure if they actually had these at the aquarium i visited with my school once but i get the association of this machine with that place.
If I remember correctly from a conversation I had when these were current, the top of the G3 AIO (being designed for the education market), was the shape it was to discourage students from placing things on top, or "helping" items placed on top to fall off so that the vents on the top wouldn't be blocked.
Our school got a whole lab of these and they did indeed have us use the dual headphone ports. We would watch multimedia programs two kids to a computer so they could fit twice as many students in the lab.
It's a CRT, there is no fixed resolution for CRTs 1024x768 @ 70hz would work. Although 800x600 @ 85hz would give you less flicker if you're used to getting headaches from CRTs.
My high school computer lab (circa 2003) had several of these "molar Macs". We weren't exactly the most well-funded school and I distinctly remember the majority of the computers in the lab being pre-G3, 60x-based models. There was a Power Mac 8100/80 (which was my favorite because I loved the minitower form factor!) and several of those god-awful LC 5200 all-in-ones. These funky-looking G3s ran circles around the lot of them. Don't know if we ever got any G3 iMacs; all I know is we didn't have any by the time I graduated in '04.
I was raised on the apple II in 5th grade and then we got the Molar G3’s in 7th grade in catholic school. I got an eMac from the trash of the public school still works and was my first Mac in high school.
Even the approved upgrades I attempted to put in my Molar Mac were rejected by it. Only the RAM and HDD upgrades worked. Mine was fickle even though there was nothing wrong with it physically or internally. (I think mine may have been originally owned by Linda Blair or Damien Thorn for that reason.)
I actually found a Molar mac and a Macintosh TV at a recycling center once. Both were in rough shape, with the Mac TV suffering from rust, while the Molar Mac was just filled with dust. I disassembled both, and even repainted the molar mac in white and blue like a classic iMax G3. Unfortunately it never worked, and while the Mac TV did start up, it still has issues. Sadly I had to get rid of the molar Mac due to space , but I did manage to hold onto my Macintosh TV.
I was taking Computer Network Technologies classes back in high school(got out in 2000), and part of our class work was taking some of the load off the county's school system IT department(Aiken County SC which is the largest in the state)which was also designed to give us some real world IT field experience, and I remember one day in early 99 we took a field trip to one of the elementary schools who had just gotten a mix of the Molar Macs(I guess Apple had some surplus stock they wanted to unload for cheap 🤷), and iMac G3 units to replace their earlier 68K Macs, and Apple IIE systems.(Apple IIE systems seriously hung around for way too long in my school system), and we were being tasked with getting the stuff ready for e-waste, but sadly we were not allowed to keep any of the old Apple 68K, and Apple IIe stuff 😫 But yeah I remember couple of my friends commenting on how the Molar Macs looked like something that belonged in a creepy dentist office 😂
My high school bought them new and they were the first G3s I'd ever touched and the first really fast Macs I'd ever used. It's maybe the only computer model that can instantly conjure a series of fond memories for me. I learned to program on one, made really meaningful friendships in front of one. I'll love this computer forever. Update: I noticed the stamp from my old school district so I've decided to assume you're restoring the actual computer that I learned to program on.
I saw one of these recently at a Goodwill where you buy things from large bins by the pound (pay for it by weight). It was heavy, so nobody bought it. They then wheel the bin containing it to the back where it gets shredded and recycled.
This was used at my School where I taught. But, I couldn't get one as it was slated for another Department!😞 This one you have was definitely a Media center computer back in the day!😅 It IS a monster being 60 Lbs., so that was one reason I bought an iMac (2nd edition-Grape) and later for 2 more for my kids!) Still, this Mac did have its own advantages.
The Molar Mac looks like an iMac drawn by none other than Sam O' Nella. Like "Hey kids. Today i'm gonna show you the computer of my dreams back in my childhood. Some of my design decision may appear odd but bear with me. But first we need to design the shape of the PC. I want it to look kinda boxy like 90s PCs but not too boxy to make it stand out a little. I also want it to be an All in One PC because the desk in my room was very small and i knew that i will have a small desk in college too. Desk space was a luxury my mom and my government can't afford. The monitor goes to the top and the rest of the hardware goes to the bottom. The bottom is extra thick to accomodate the speakers. I want them to be on the left and right to really get that sweet sweet stereo sound. I also want the PC to have many drives. Like one zip drive and one floppy drive. We need them both like we needed both Betamax and VHS players to play back all videos. Since we have some space left on the bottom, why don't we add a CD drive? I want the PC of my dreams to have the ability to play back burned copies of Spice Girls in our dorm rooms. The volume buttons go above the cd drive and the floppy drives right in the center so that once i put the CD in, i can crank the volume in my dorm room or turn it down to not get in trouble with my mom while i still live with her. And finally i want two headphone jack. One close to the left speaker and one close to the right speaker at the same height as the volume buttons. I am still hoping that one day i will a) get a friend and b) said friend enjoys my music just enough to get their headphones out and listen to my favorite songs from Spice Girls. This PC also needs to run Mac because there is no video editing software for Windows and there won't be one for at least the next 10 years. So there we have it. My PC of my dreams." And the Molar Mac is like "Kiiiill... meeee... pleeeeaaaase..."
The ISL lab in my elementary school had 1 of these computers and I always was fascinated by it. Definitely a gem from my childhood that always brings back fond memories.
Of course, I wasn't alive when these were a thing, but I remember the computer lab in kindergarten like it was yesterday, it was 2006. We had a bunch of slot loading iMac G3's running OS X (spinning beachball of death) and some eMacs that seemed to be the same thing. Sometimes the teacher would turn off all the lights, so the light from the computers bouncing off everyone's faces was really memorable. I also absolutely loved that they had two headphone jacks and I wish that every device had it. It felt like what we were doing was illegal, because it was so much fun using the computer compared to the tedious schoolwork that would typically fill the day. I had one at home where I played whatever games we had because it was a hand-me-down from my sister. Then they decided to get some Windows 7 Dell computers instead, not nearly as memorable and I liked Mac OS 9 or OS X because of their character. Windows grew on me because I'm still glued to the computer and I like to game.
I love the molar mac, when I was in school, all the teachers had these at there desk, we had the more common iMacs to use so I never got to enjoy them, but loved how much bigger they were and always wanted one
Oh shit! My elementary school had one of these and a couple Performa 5200s. Most likely long gone to the scrapyards, especially since they had to rebuild the entire building. Really wish I could've saved them...
My school had a few entire labs full of those PCs. My junior year the school was overcrowded, and they opened the labs up as normal classrooms. This was 1999. My English class was in one of the labs and we would secretly use the PCs all class to chat using AOL Instant Messager and browsing sites like FARK and Hot or Not. Oh the memories. I always thought the front looked like a weird face. With the headphone jacks as the eyes, volume rocker was the nose, the 2 floppy drives were the mustache, and the CD was the mouth. Now you cannot unsee it. lol The library had the Imac in Bandai Blue. the one with the CD drawer.
I have never seen this before. I am anthropomorphizing it. The lower front looks like it has three mouths, a weird lumpy nose, and two eyes which are spaced way too far apart. And I don't understand why Apple went to all that trouble with designing the curvy case which gives it the ugly molar shape. Very bizarre. It looks like its designers were on some sort of LSD trip.
This thing is as close to "Function over form" as apple seems to get. I can imagine that the upgradable drawer motherboard can be used for all kinds of fun upgrades. Looking forward to seeing what you do next!
I remember these were the big upgrade when our elementary school computer lab switched over from (vaguely remember inserting giant floppies in a very dark room and thinking of it’s one of those things I can’t afford) a bunch of old ones. But within 2 years the iMacs started flowing in. It one of the first parts of the school to get AC which the rest of the school up and running after graduation. Not that it’s relevant but the AC installations also followed graduation for middle and high school, computer labs were the best.
We had a lot of Macs in our comm-tech lab in highschool in the late 90's... Several PowerMac G3 towers and desktops, had no idea they made an all-in-one version. The only all-in-ones I remember my school having were the completely unrelated Unisys/Burroughs Icon and the Performa 5200. The Performas only stuck around for about two years before they replaced them with PC's... My younger brother attended the same school a few years later and said all the macs were gone... this was around 2001-2002.
Wow, this video made my Thanksgiving holiday weekend complete. While, most hate the design of this desktop computer, I just Love it and always have. Why, it was the replacement for Apple's All-in-One 5200/5400/5500 series systems which, were my first ever Apple computers. Even today, I still own a working All-in-One 5500 in my collection with an internal Apple Video system capture card, Apple TV/FM radio system card with its matching black remote control, plus a G3 upgrade card. However, concerning the colorful CRT iMac's, I have never cared for them and always preferred these Apple G3 All-in-One systems. Why? Because, I would select the model with a built-in Zip drive and video capture card, and then add into its three (3) open PCI expansion slots the following: a two port USB "A" card, a two port Fire-wire 400 card, and still have an open expansion card free (smile...smile).
Man, the constant hating on the design, I think it looks great, real smooth lines and the massive "Drive bay" area has a feeling of being able to do a lot.
Saw the philly school district stamp and had to say something.. when this mac came out the philly school district was still servicing apple 2e and eduquests..
We had one of those in our school library. It was the last Mac they got... I think ever, actually; it was flanked on either side by that horizontal case PowerMac you brought out near the beginning, and ran MacOS 8 which at the time felt like a huge visual upgrade over the System 7 that had been running on every other library Mac since I'd started going there back in 1991. Reminded me of AOL's UI at the time, with its chunky 3D buttons and window frames that made it look kind of like the plastic the computer itself was made of. (And of course, featuring a pale version of that particular shade of indigo that was all the rage in the '90s.) I remember playing a _Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?_ game that was basically a point-and-click adventure game. I remember one puzzle that involved recording Thomas Edison's voice on some of his own wax cylinders and then playing them back out of order to trick someone into giving you a spool of thread to use as the filament in the first light bulb. I don't remember why he was trying to stop you from getting supplies for him, but that's Edison for you.
Interestingly, I only have bad memories from the Macs of the 90s. I remember the first one we got at home, a lower-tier desktop model from '96, and the problems started with it outputting a signal that the monitor couldn't handle, and you'd assume that resetting the PRAM would default it to a lower resolution, but no. So my dad had to bring it to work and connect it to a better monitor, just to set the resolution down. And if you dared to play around with the control panel for the resolution, and chose a resolution and refresh rate that the monitor couldn't handle, it would not recover, or give you like 10 seconds of grace period until reverting back. Just switch the resolution, and instantly make the computer unusable. When we got a SCSI CD burner, it was 50:50 at best for a full CD to get successfully burned. Fucking Toast shit program, would always freeze the computer. Use a Wacom tablet with a USB card? Hopeless! Then I started working, and at the office we had a mix of Windows, Apple (mostly G3) and some SGI stuff. Macs always creating problems. SCSI? Never works right. Network? Randomly "can't connect to the AppleTalk server". Have something important to do? Quark or Illustrator freezing the whole computer. All while the machines with Win 2000 and IRIX worked like a charm, and when something didn't work, it was actually easy to diagnose, because the OS wouldn't hide the problems behind meaningless error codes. Nowadays, with the Internet and forums and downloadable ISOs and stuff, it's a different story. But I feel like Macs were always way too cryptic. It either works or it doesn't, and fuck you if you want to know exactly why it doesn't work.
Yes, you make some good points. As a home computer user my first Apple computer was in 1996, an All-in-One 5400 which, I just loved. As long as everything had an "Apple logo" on it (printer, scanner, camera, etc.) things, just worked great. However, if there was a problem each computer came with Lifetime (800) toll free support. So, help was just a telephone call away. However, when Apple moved to USB "A" and Fire-wire 400, all of their prior SCSI problems ... went away (smile...smile).
@@transitengineer SCSI was always a shitshow. Really glad when our storage solution finally switched to fibre channel. Literally every problem, including limitations with hard-drive sizes, went away. Fragile cables, fragile connectors, termination issues, ID issues. Back then we had MO and Zip drives with SCSI, because that was somehow more reliable than the MacOS network stack. But even the parallel port Zip drives we had on PCs worked better than them. Anyway, nowadays fiddling around with them is fun, I still have a Mac Classic from back then to restore. But the failure with the BeOS installation reminded me exactly of what was wrong back then with these machines.
@@graealex someone got really angry with me insisting BeOS was great if you only knew exactly what hardware it wanted, it was funny. They said anyone who was around at the time knew it, even though there were so many other comments much like yours here saying they remember having a really bad time with it.
I've got one of these. I liked using it but the thermal sending sensor failed, so it sounds like a jet engine, and now I think the flyback transformer is going out. I'll have to fix it up someday.
When I was in the twelfth grade, my math teacher had a few Molar Mac G3s in the storage room in his class. I asked him if I could have at least one of them, but he told me that "they were still in use" or something like that. He did give me two iMac G3s and an iMac G3 keyboard, though.
The shape of the molar mac vs the imac was because apples pre jobs design was to build the case around the computer. Steve jobs built the hardware to fit the case.
I got one of those for less than $30 in the mid-2000s and took it to college. I would still have it but the monitor died and I couldn't find anyone who could fix it. Now the cheapest one I've ever seen was more than $400.00. I loved how it looked so weird (though to be fair, my first computer was a Mac SE SuperDrive).
I always called it the French Chef Mac, because the front of it looked like a face and it looked like he was wearing a tall white hat with a screen built in. Two eyes, nose, beauty mark, hon hon oui oui mustache, the side burn speakers, and the cd tray mouth.
Offset your carbon footprint on Wren: wren.co/start/actionretro - The first 100 people who sign up will have 10 extra trees planted in their name!
@@SuikaIbuki The whole carbon footprint thing is a joke anyways. If you look at human civilization and developments in tech, people take up less energy for many things already and our pollution output is significantly smaller. LED lights, smaller high-compression engines, more efficient computers, catalytic converters, DEF systems on diesel motors, etc. We don't need to spend money for some fictional political reasons to offset what we're doing.
Hey, I run a healthcare startup, that patients can be seen at home 100% and labs, tests and medications can all be delivered. It is all powered by AI and reduces your carbon foot print by eliminating any need to drive to care. Want to be part of meaningful change, let’s talk!
@@sbrazenor2 Came here to say the same thing. The whole Wren thing is such hollow nonsense and creators peddling the narrative of "your personal carbon footprint" are jokes.
Stop hounding people who can control jack when it comes to emissions, and demand change from the corporations who cause the most emissions while benefitting from the carbon footprint narrative
Sounds like some communist nonsense.
As far as gpu upgrades what is the slot on the card? and can we get a good close up of the card?
Gotta love that "my life is pain" face the Molar Mac front panel has!!
It *does* give out Hide The Pain Harold vibes, doesn’t it? 🤔
It looks grumpy more than anything
That's so funny! To me the magnetic disk drives look more like a dignified mustache.
-_-
It's like the Pug dog of Mac computers
I had one of those Molar Macs and like a fool got rid of it many years ago. That is one of Apples best computers ever made. Although ugly, the potential for upgrades made it a beast and the ability to easily repair it, makes it legendary :)
Yes, you are correct. I have always wanted one to add to my collection. Back in the day, I wanted to buy the version with the Zip disk drive and using its three (3) open PCI slots add a two port USB "A card and a two port Fire-wire 400 card (smile...smile).
@@transitengineer I had a full list of upgrades in mine and used it till 2010 as a daily driver. By the time I retired it, I had a DVD / CD Super Drive, USB Multi Card Reader, 1.44 Floppy, Built-in KB / Monitor Switch & RCA Switch for the personality card, X86 Mini PC = Hooked to the personality card & KB / Monitor Switch, USB / Firewire Card, Sata Card, ATI Radeon 9200 128MB PCI, 400 Mhz G3 Processor Upgrade, 768MB Ram, 250gb 2.5" IDE HD, sata 250gb 2.5" HD. Lastly I has a Global Village 28.8K Speaker phone modem plugged into my personality card, loaded with mega phone. Externally I had a Zip Drive (SCSI) & a VSE Super Disk Drive. Nothing I have seen has come close to that system since and I really miss it. Good memories, for that Mac :)
@@mccrh7737 Were you able to use the Radeon with the internal display? If so, how did you connect the two?
@@JustinRied no
Same... I had one too, but got rid of it when I had too many Macs at one-point-in-time, so didnt have any space to store it. Alas.
8:35 Technically, all screws are "hanging on by a thread".
We had a few of these at my school, where they were used as teacher's computers in classrooms. The computer labs had lots of Power Macintosh 5200s, but they eventually upgraded them to iMacs before going all-Windows with, swear to god, a bunch of those "never obsolete!" eMachines. Two steps forward, three steps back.
at least its a better os smh
Not even Dells or HPs?
@@christiangomez2496 Right? It was a private college prep school, too, so it's not like money was an issue.
@@jonathankleinow2073 I'm assuming they were on that good shit.
We had a whole bunch of these in the music room as a kid, but we never actually used them. This was around 2005-2009ish, no clue where they are now. Wasn't able to identify them for years until I saw a picture of these randomly one day on my Facebook feed.
It's the Pontiac Aztek of Macs: hideous on the outside, not too bad inside.
that's the perfect analogy lol
That's great 😂😂
Back in the 2000s, some friends found several Molar Macs in a dumpster behind a school in the suburbs of Chicago. They brought them into our screen printing shop and we got them all running! They gave me one as a thank you gift for helping, and I actually used it in our graphics workflow for several years to convert files from pixel to vector files.
I had then at my high school, it’s the most awesome Mac of its era , always wanted one
It's time for the beige G3s to fulfill their destiny and run Mac OSX. Looking forward to that video as it's something I've wanted to do when I get one of these.
Yes, these models do support OS X. Which, will give you the best of both worlds to run both classic OS 9 and Power PC OS X software (smile..smile).
OS X on old world G3s is no fun to install.
VGA is 5 signals, RGB, HS, VS, plus a whole lot of grounding for clean signalling. 10 pins implies it's likely VGA, but knowing apple they might have shoved a side channel to talk to the display for the fancy control of the brightness and positioning in there. 5 mins with a scope could figure out if the display signals are VGA, if so you could likely get the monitor showing a picture, just without control of brightness. (unless they're crazy enough to be doing that on the VGA card)
VGA supports monitor control over DDC/CI and this was actually pretty well supported on many PCs. However the G3 is a bit too old for that. It's probably similar though.
My favorite use for my Molar is as a bridge device. It’s a great little complete package that lets me easily make floppies for my 512k as well as other 68k Macs
no. it doesn’t have the 400k disk drive
@@jessihawkins9116 yes but if it’s a 400k disk image it will still work. As long as the disk image is 400k it will write to the single side of an 800k disk and will still be readable. 800k floopies can also be formatted to 400k
@@DontGetHit648 yes but not with a SuperDrive. It will read those disks but not write them. You will need something like a Mac Plus to make your 128k/512k and Mac XL/Lisa images
@@jessihawkins9116 what do you mean “not with a super drive”? I’ve made 400k disks on my molar Mac that work in 400k drives and 800k drives using 800k floppies. I don’t have any spare 400k disks to see if those work but those are so hard to even get it doesn’t really matter
@@DontGetHit648 they don’t work with 400k disks so don’t bother.
8:05 - The person who designed it loved cats. It's the perfect shape or a cat sleep on, and all the heat from the computer comes up through the vents to keep the kitty nice and toasty.
I had one! Upgrded it with Sony CDRW, larger HDD, and maxed the RAM. Worked great dual booting OS 9.2 and 10.2. With ADB, SCSI, and adding USB it could do anything. I miss that thing but I don't miss moving it.
Heh, I remember that when these were introduced there was a lot of demand for them to be sold to home users and not just to schools; Apple actually released a statement that ( *very* paraphrased) “ _we’ve heard your interest, and we’ll introducing something we think you’ll like later in the year…_ “
why 😆
It's the AU Falcon of vintage Apple. Just needs a Barra Swap (AKA a G4), and it will destroy everyone who dares to question its appearance
My school had a TON of these. They have a soft spot in my heart because I actually built my first website one of them over many many study halls.
Is the power cord guide also designed to store a spoon?
I was insanely fortunate to see these when they were in their prime: Back in the 2002-2003 school year I helped the CompSci teacher oversee the lab and there was a pretty even split between the G3 AIOs, the Power Mac 5200s, and the iMac G3 slot loaders.
Never used them much, unfortunately, but they were there and they were interesting looking.
Actually ended up getting one with what appeared to be a failed flyback from the one and only Garth Beagle, but CRT stuff is kinda outside my pay grade and research suggested that even with the proper flyback it'd still need some fine tuning which...yeah. Ended up handing it off to a friend who knows this stuff way better than I do.
I have so much nostalgia for those g3's.
Yes, I have always wanted one in my collection to join with my All-in-One 5500. Back in the day, I would have selected the model with the built-in Zip drive and for its three (3) open PCI slots would have added a two port USB "A" card and a two port Fire-wire 400 card (smile...smile).
I *did* have the privilege of seeing and using one back in the day, if only briefly, and in my own home! My dad was a systems engineer for an Apple Education Reseller and he would often bring home machines to try out. The G3 AIO was no exception. I still remember it sitting on the desk, being almost too big to fit on it. We grew up with a Mac Classic, and used LC 575's at school so I was always fascinated with AIO machines. The fact that this one was so expandable kinda blew my mind, even if the design wasn't the best. I can't remember how long we had it for -- it probably wouldn't have been very long. Within the next year we saw an original iMac and a B&W G3, which stuck around a bit longer, and allowing for some fun network gaming with Carmageddon, Age of Empires, Dark Vengeance, etc.
i dont think it would be hard to find the service manual for it and find the pinout for the internal video connector pinout then make a vga cable adapter for it. But there is another issue is how the new card can control the settings for the monitor unless you use the pins for the rgb input only.
I love that computer! It’s hilarious that you put eyes on them. This is why I love your channel
Well Sean I see your still holding Steve captive LOL That is one crazy heavy looking G3 Mac very curious about what kind of upgrades you can throw in that thing
I haven't watched the entire video yet but I just had to say, I love your choice of t-shirts in every episode, I always get a chuckle out of them
It seems to be RGB for the monitor. There is also controls for changing the Monitor's settings like position and such.
Any possibility of a connector that drives the internal display from a standard VGA connection?
@@JustinRied dunno what the Pinout is for the monitor but could be possible to use one of those arcade rgb to vga controller boards.
Believe it or not, my mother who was a school teacher, bought four of these for her small business. I remember seeing four of them in her house at one time.
Cool, I have always loved these All-in-One G3 desktop computers.
I remember servicing these as a summer job in high school, it was the most advanced Mac at the schools (yes I'm dating myself here).
I was doing the same back in the late 90's. It feels like a few years ago... not like 20+. 😳
I have always loved these All-in-One G3 desktop computers. They were the prefect upgrade to my first Apple computer an All-in-One 5400 (smile...smile).
I envy you.
That "None pizza with left beef" thing is hilarious...
My 6th grade teacher had a PowerMac 5400 in the classroom, I don't think the students were allowed to use it, but the school did buy a bunch of the iMac G3's in blue for the computer labs. I don't like Macs, but the sight of these classic machines brings me back to a better time of my youth.
I have always liked this AIO design. It's unusual and off putting. Congrats on the find. I have the G3 tower, and the desktop, but this one is still missing from my collection. Need new faceplates for the tower though. Some part of it broke.
You see, that's what I love about Action Retro. This kind of presentation definitely has some teeth.
IIRC these " Molar Mac " systems use a VGA signal for the internal display but it uses special hardware and software to do it. That said with a Mac compatible VGA card you should be able to make it work with a little bit of tinkering.
I have one of these I was given to by a school I was doing some work at in 2003, fprgot I even had it until I went into the crawl space under my steps to do some electrical work. I am going to get it going again eventually , vids like this one serve me with 2 things , a kick in the ass to get me going on it , and gives me valuable info on the internals , thanks tons and I have subscribed to keep an eye on your progress on it
My eletemtary school had one molar mac plus a bunch of older macs but i remember playing games on ie in os 9 man what a blast that it was. Kid pix deluxe as well back in 2004 or 2003 give or take
While I don’t know for certain, given that the internal display is a CRT, that header on the personality card is almost certainly RGBHV (“VGA”). You’d need a test pattern on the Mac and an oscilloscope to verify. You could probably desolder the DE15 connector on a newer video card and solder a header adapter.
I have one of these. I only gave it a few modest upgrades like a 400MHz processor, 6MB of VRAM, Zip drive, and the AV card. Some of the early AV cards have the requisite connectors to work in these, but none of the DVD cards do. I don't think anybody has found a way to get upgraded video to the internal screen without a lot of hackery and some lost features (notably display geometry and brightness control). These have a lot of the same problems of other CRT-based Apple products of the era, namely: cracked solder joints on the HV circuits. You may have to touch those up, especially around the flyback.
The way we cleaned the cases of machines that came in for repair at the Apple authorized repair center I used to work at was to use lemon extract from a bakery supply company. We bought it in gallon bottles. The citrus terpenes plus the alcohol cleaned things right up and left the repair lemony fresh.... actually the smell went away from the case right away but the shop was left lemony fresh.
I remember my middle school got the iMac g3 in red and they had the At Ease on them. Basically was to keep us from exploring around the hard drive, a bummer at the time. Would have loved to see one of these but they went with the iMac.
seeing these with the two headphone out ports gives me a vague memory... I'm not sure if they actually had these at the aquarium i visited with my school once but i get the association of this machine with that place.
I do like those Disk On Module things, they're a bit pricy, but work great. And hey I do still have those G4 iBooks we were talking about over email
I'm planning on sticking one in my 1.6 xbox. And my eMac G4.
They’re cheaper if you get them on eBay. I got a 16 GB one recently for about 16 or 17 bucks
If I remember correctly from a conversation I had when these were current, the top of the G3 AIO (being designed for the education market), was the shape it was to discourage students from placing things on top, or "helping" items placed on top to fall off so that the vents on the top wouldn't be blocked.
The cameos with Steve are priceless! 🤣
Our school got a whole lab of these and they did indeed have us use the dual headphone ports. We would watch multimedia programs two kids to a computer so they could fit twice as many students in the lab.
It's a CRT, there is no fixed resolution for CRTs 1024x768 @ 70hz would work. Although 800x600 @ 85hz would give you less flicker if you're used to getting headaches from CRTs.
In high school I remember we had a classroom full of iMacs but our teacher had this as a workgroup server before they upgraded him to a G3 tower.
My high school computer lab (circa 2003) had several of these "molar Macs". We weren't exactly the most well-funded school and I distinctly remember the majority of the computers in the lab being pre-G3, 60x-based models. There was a Power Mac 8100/80 (which was my favorite because I loved the minitower form factor!) and several of those god-awful LC 5200 all-in-ones. These funky-looking G3s ran circles around the lot of them. Don't know if we ever got any G3 iMacs; all I know is we didn't have any by the time I graduated in '04.
I was raised on the apple II in 5th grade and then we got the Molar G3’s in 7th grade in catholic school. I got an eMac from the trash of the public school still works and was my first Mac in high school.
NGL, Doug Demuro jumpscare got me good.
Even the approved upgrades I attempted to put in my Molar Mac were rejected by it. Only the RAM and HDD upgrades worked. Mine was fickle even though there was nothing wrong with it physically or internally. (I think mine may have been originally owned by Linda Blair or Damien Thorn for that reason.)
I actually found a Molar mac and a Macintosh TV at a recycling center once. Both were in rough shape, with the Mac TV suffering from rust, while the Molar Mac was just filled with dust. I disassembled both, and even repainted the molar mac in white and blue like a classic iMax G3. Unfortunately it never worked, and while the Mac TV did start up, it still has issues. Sadly I had to get rid of the molar Mac due to space , but I did manage to hold onto my Macintosh TV.
I was taking Computer Network Technologies classes back in high school(got out in 2000), and part of our class work was taking some of the load off the county's school system IT department(Aiken County SC which is the largest in the state)which was also designed to give us some real world IT field experience, and I remember one day in early 99 we took a field trip to one of the elementary schools who had just gotten a mix of the Molar Macs(I guess Apple had some surplus stock they wanted to unload for cheap 🤷), and iMac G3 units to replace their earlier 68K Macs, and Apple IIE systems.(Apple IIE systems seriously hung around for way too long in my school system), and we were being tasked with getting the stuff ready for e-waste, but sadly we were not allowed to keep any of the old Apple 68K, and Apple IIe stuff 😫 But yeah I remember couple of my friends commenting on how the Molar Macs looked like something that belonged in a creepy dentist office 😂
My high school bought them new and they were the first G3s I'd ever touched and the first really fast Macs I'd ever used. It's maybe the only computer model that can instantly conjure a series of fond memories for me. I learned to program on one, made really meaningful friendships in front of one. I'll love this computer forever.
Update: I noticed the stamp from my old school district so I've decided to assume you're restoring the actual computer that I learned to program on.
I saw one of these recently at a Goodwill where you buy things from large bins by the pound (pay for it by weight). It was heavy, so nobody bought it. They then wheel the bin containing it to the back where it gets shredded and recycled.
This was used at my School where I taught. But, I couldn't get one as it was slated for another Department!😞
This one you have was definitely a Media center computer back in the day!😅
It IS a monster being 60 Lbs., so that was one reason I bought an iMac (2nd edition-Grape) and later for 2 more for my kids!)
Still, this Mac did have its own advantages.
When you turned the machine to the side, I wasn't expecting so much depth! Great video!👍
We had one of these in my 9th grade English classroom. I loved using it- it was quite the powerful machine back then
It's BizSnes' long lost brother!!!
i just died of laughter when Steve made his cameo.
Nightmare Corrosion could be a Corrosion of Conformity tribute band
I second that motion. CoC is freaking awesome 👍
the fact he has a none pizza left beef shirt is.. incredible.
I actually had this system in my middle school back in the day - and I stuck with using the G3 Powermac as it had video in.
Obviously you are doing a G4 upgrade. Okay....OSX now!
The Molar Mac looks like an iMac drawn by none other than Sam O' Nella.
Like "Hey kids. Today i'm gonna show you the computer of my dreams back in my childhood. Some of my design decision may appear odd but bear with me.
But first we need to design the shape of the PC. I want it to look kinda boxy like 90s PCs but not too boxy to make it stand out a little. I also want it to be an All in One PC because the desk in my room was very small and i knew that i will have a small desk in college too. Desk space was a luxury my mom and my government can't afford. The monitor goes to the top and the rest of the hardware goes to the bottom.
The bottom is extra thick to accomodate the speakers. I want them to be on the left and right to really get that sweet sweet stereo sound. I also want the PC to have many drives. Like one zip drive and one floppy drive. We need them both like we needed both Betamax and VHS players to play back all videos.
Since we have some space left on the bottom, why don't we add a CD drive? I want the PC of my dreams to have the ability to play back burned copies of Spice Girls in our dorm rooms.
The volume buttons go above the cd drive and the floppy drives right in the center so that once i put the CD in, i can crank the volume in my dorm room or turn it down to not get in trouble with my mom while i still live with her. And finally i want two headphone jack. One close to the left speaker and one close to the right speaker at the same height as the volume buttons. I am still hoping that one day i will a) get a friend and b) said friend enjoys my music just enough to get their headphones out and listen to my favorite songs from Spice Girls.
This PC also needs to run Mac because there is no video editing software for Windows and there won't be one for at least the next 10 years.
So there we have it. My PC of my dreams."
And the Molar Mac is like "Kiiiill... meeee... pleeeeaaaase..."
The eyes make this mac infinitely better.
Like an inverse teletubby.
wait...
The ISL lab in my elementary school had 1 of these computers and I always was fascinated by it. Definitely a gem from my childhood that always brings back fond memories.
Warning: the liquid nitrogen cooling system for whatever 12 Thz CPU you intend to put in this thing will never fit underneath the CRT.
Looks like the franken berry mascot
I cheered when you found the translucent logos… has my life always been this unexciting?
Of course, I wasn't alive when these were a thing, but I remember the computer lab in kindergarten like it was yesterday, it was 2006. We had a bunch of slot loading iMac G3's running OS X (spinning beachball of death) and some eMacs that seemed to be the same thing. Sometimes the teacher would turn off all the lights, so the light from the computers bouncing off everyone's faces was really memorable. I also absolutely loved that they had two headphone jacks and I wish that every device had it. It felt like what we were doing was illegal, because it was so much fun using the computer compared to the tedious schoolwork that would typically fill the day. I had one at home where I played whatever games we had because it was a hand-me-down from my sister. Then they decided to get some Windows 7 Dell computers instead, not nearly as memorable and I liked Mac OS 9 or OS X because of their character. Windows grew on me because I'm still glued to the computer and I like to game.
I love the molar mac, when I was in school, all the teachers had these at there desk, we had the more common iMacs to use so I never got to enjoy them, but loved how much bigger they were and always wanted one
@Action Retro why didn't you set the monitor resolution to 1024x768? It was a listed option 11:32
Higher resolutions will have lower refresh rates, and 1024x768 is a little overkill for classic mac os
Also, smaller fonts mean it doesn't look good on camera. At least that's been my experience.
Oh shit! My elementary school had one of these and a couple Performa 5200s. Most likely long gone to the scrapyards, especially since they had to rebuild the entire building. Really wish I could've saved them...
I'd love to know what kind of software was on that Mac originally. School software is nostalgic and interesting to me.
This is what my school had growing up and it's so cool to see again.
My school had a few entire labs full of those PCs. My junior year the school was overcrowded, and they opened the labs up as normal classrooms. This was 1999. My English class was in one of the labs and we would secretly use the PCs all class to chat using AOL Instant Messager and browsing sites like FARK and Hot or Not. Oh the memories. I always thought the front looked like a weird face. With the headphone jacks as the eyes, volume rocker was the nose, the 2 floppy drives were the mustache, and the CD was the mouth. Now you cannot unsee it. lol The library had the Imac in Bandai Blue. the one with the CD drawer.
I have never seen this before. I am anthropomorphizing it. The lower front looks like it has three mouths, a weird lumpy nose, and two eyes which are spaced way too far apart. And I don't understand why Apple went to all that trouble with designing the curvy case which gives it the ugly molar shape. Very bizarre. It looks like its designers were on some sort of LSD trip.
I love youtuber collabs. Thanks for helping otu Steve.
Hope you enjoy your molar mac.
This thing is as close to "Function over form" as apple seems to get. I can imagine that the upgradable drawer motherboard can be used for all kinds of fun upgrades. Looking forward to seeing what you do next!
I've been looking forward to you doing a Molar video. Awesome as always :)
I almost died with that photo of Doug. Quirks and features indeed.
Thanks for your videos!!!
I remember these were the big upgrade when our elementary school computer lab switched over from (vaguely remember inserting giant floppies in a very dark room and thinking of it’s one of those things I can’t afford) a bunch of old ones. But within 2 years the iMacs started flowing in. It one of the first parts of the school to get AC which the rest of the school up and running after graduation. Not that it’s relevant but the AC installations also followed graduation for middle and high school, computer labs were the best.
Love the Doug Demuro shout out!
We had a lot of Macs in our comm-tech lab in highschool in the late 90's... Several PowerMac G3 towers and desktops, had no idea they made an all-in-one version. The only all-in-ones I remember my school having were the completely unrelated Unisys/Burroughs Icon and the Performa 5200. The Performas only stuck around for about two years before they replaced them with PC's... My younger brother attended the same school a few years later and said all the macs were gone... this was around 2001-2002.
Wow, this video made my Thanksgiving holiday weekend complete. While, most hate the design of this desktop computer, I just Love it and always have. Why, it was the replacement for Apple's All-in-One 5200/5400/5500 series systems which, were my first ever Apple computers. Even today, I still own a working All-in-One 5500 in my collection with an internal Apple Video system capture card, Apple TV/FM radio system card with its matching black remote control, plus a G3 upgrade card. However, concerning the colorful CRT iMac's, I have never cared for them and always preferred these Apple G3 All-in-One systems. Why? Because, I would select the model with a built-in Zip drive and video capture card, and then add into its three (3) open PCI expansion slots the following: a two port USB "A" card, a two port Fire-wire 400 card, and still have an open expansion card free (smile...smile).
Man, the constant hating on the design, I think it looks great, real smooth lines and the massive "Drive bay" area has a feeling of being able to do a lot.
Love the moments with Steve! Perfect!!
I had to wait until 5:55 until shenanigans were mentioned. The shenanigans must begin sooner! 🤣
Saw the philly school district stamp and had to say something.. when this mac came out the philly school district was still servicing apple 2e and eduquests..
We had one of those in our school library. It was the last Mac they got... I think ever, actually; it was flanked on either side by that horizontal case PowerMac you brought out near the beginning, and ran MacOS 8 which at the time felt like a huge visual upgrade over the System 7 that had been running on every other library Mac since I'd started going there back in 1991. Reminded me of AOL's UI at the time, with its chunky 3D buttons and window frames that made it look kind of like the plastic the computer itself was made of. (And of course, featuring a pale version of that particular shade of indigo that was all the rage in the '90s.) I remember playing a _Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?_ game that was basically a point-and-click adventure game. I remember one puzzle that involved recording Thomas Edison's voice on some of his own wax cylinders and then playing them back out of order to trick someone into giving you a spool of thread to use as the filament in the first light bulb. I don't remember why he was trying to stop you from getting supplies for him, but that's Edison for you.
My high school had one of these. I loved it.
Awesome video! I can't wait for the stream of upgrade videos to come!
Interestingly, I only have bad memories from the Macs of the 90s. I remember the first one we got at home, a lower-tier desktop model from '96, and the problems started with it outputting a signal that the monitor couldn't handle, and you'd assume that resetting the PRAM would default it to a lower resolution, but no. So my dad had to bring it to work and connect it to a better monitor, just to set the resolution down. And if you dared to play around with the control panel for the resolution, and chose a resolution and refresh rate that the monitor couldn't handle, it would not recover, or give you like 10 seconds of grace period until reverting back. Just switch the resolution, and instantly make the computer unusable.
When we got a SCSI CD burner, it was 50:50 at best for a full CD to get successfully burned. Fucking Toast shit program, would always freeze the computer. Use a Wacom tablet with a USB card? Hopeless!
Then I started working, and at the office we had a mix of Windows, Apple (mostly G3) and some SGI stuff. Macs always creating problems. SCSI? Never works right. Network? Randomly "can't connect to the AppleTalk server". Have something important to do? Quark or Illustrator freezing the whole computer. All while the machines with Win 2000 and IRIX worked like a charm, and when something didn't work, it was actually easy to diagnose, because the OS wouldn't hide the problems behind meaningless error codes.
Nowadays, with the Internet and forums and downloadable ISOs and stuff, it's a different story. But I feel like Macs were always way too cryptic. It either works or it doesn't, and fuck you if you want to know exactly why it doesn't work.
Yes, you make some good points. As a home computer user my first Apple computer was in 1996, an All-in-One 5400 which, I just loved. As long as everything had an "Apple logo" on it (printer, scanner, camera, etc.) things, just worked great. However, if there was a problem each computer came with Lifetime (800) toll free support. So, help was just a telephone call away. However, when Apple moved to USB "A" and Fire-wire 400, all of their prior SCSI problems ... went away (smile...smile).
@@transitengineer SCSI was always a shitshow. Really glad when our storage solution finally switched to fibre channel. Literally every problem, including limitations with hard-drive sizes, went away. Fragile cables, fragile connectors, termination issues, ID issues. Back then we had MO and Zip drives with SCSI, because that was somehow more reliable than the MacOS network stack. But even the parallel port Zip drives we had on PCs worked better than them.
Anyway, nowadays fiddling around with them is fun, I still have a Mac Classic from back then to restore. But the failure with the BeOS installation reminded me exactly of what was wrong back then with these machines.
@@graealex someone got really angry with me insisting BeOS was great if you only knew exactly what hardware it wanted, it was funny. They said anyone who was around at the time knew it, even though there were so many other comments much like yours here saying they remember having a really bad time with it.
I've got one of these. I liked using it but the thermal sending sensor failed, so it sounds like a jet engine, and now I think the flyback transformer is going out. I'll have to fix it up someday.
2:14 LOL!
EDIT: Seeing that "School District of Philadelphia" stamp made me Smile with Nostalgia :D
When I was in the twelfth grade, my math teacher had a few Molar Mac G3s in the storage room in his class. I asked him if I could have at least one of them, but he told me that "they were still in use" or something like that. He did give me two iMac G3s and an iMac G3 keyboard, though.
The shape of the molar mac vs the imac was because apples pre jobs design was to build the case around the computer. Steve jobs built the hardware to fit the case.
My eMac looks like a Maserati in comparaison! I should take care of my Tower G3 one day.
I got one of those for less than $30 in the mid-2000s and took it to college. I would still have it but the monitor died and I couldn't find anyone who could fix it. Now the cheapest one I've ever seen was more than $400.00. I loved how it looked so weird (though to be fair, my first computer was a Mac SE SuperDrive).
I always called it the French Chef Mac, because the front of it looked like a face and it looked like he was wearing a tall white hat with a screen built in. Two eyes, nose, beauty mark, hon hon oui oui mustache, the side burn speakers, and the cd tray mouth.