As part of my ongoing campaign to own every single piece of Apple merchandise and ephemera, I have adopted the most ungainly of all one-piece Macintoshes, the Power Macintosh G3 All-in-One. It is in the shape of a translucent and somewhat lumpy molar, but provides the missing link from the classic Macintosh to the iMac.

It's actually not a bad little machine, with the same motherboard as the beige G3s of the day, a 24x (!) CD ROM drive (no burning, no DVD), a Zip drive (handy!) a floppy drive (more so!) and a built in 15" CRT. It was sold only to educational markets, and included other soon-to-be-obsolete technologies like ADB, SCSI and serial ports. It did, however, include a video out port, and had stereo speakers and a mike built-in.

As far as I can remember, it's also the last one piece Mac to have a striped logo. These days a 233 G3 doesn't get you very far, so I am starting to think about what I could do to juice it up a little. It will run 10.2.8 as it is now, but the processor and motherboard can be upgraded. It could make for an interesting and very usable machine with a couple of G4s in it and a faster bus...