This Week in Tech History: iMac and Crisco

The week of Aug. 15–21 saw a couple of innovations that changed the way we use computers and make chocolate chip cookies. One put a Cupertino computer maker back on the fast track, while the other unknowingly clogged arteries from coast to coast.

Apple's iconic iMac personal computer, marketed as if it were candy, began shipping (according to The Mac Observer) on Aug. 15, 1998, propped up in part by the halcyon days of the dot-com bubble. Also on the same day, but back in 1911, Procter & Gamble Co. created the "light" alternative to butter known as Crisco (thanks to The Center for the Study of Technology and Society), which actually has been found to be quite deadly — and now only uses a tiny smidgen of hydrogenated seed oils.

The first iMacs cost $1,299, were powered by a puny (but not at the time) 233 MHz processor, 32 MB of RAM, a 4 GB hard drive (wow!) and a CD-ROM drive. They were so revolutionary, perhaps much of it attributable to ingenious marketing, that Apple was able to sell 278,000 iMacs in the first six weeks. Check out one of the original iMac commercials below:

Long before computers, Crisco was offered as a replacement for butter and other animal fats deemed unhealthy and fattening at the time. We now know that hydrogenated vegetable oil (also called "trans fats") are probably one of the worst food products known to mankind, but this was back when athletes and doctors alike endorsed cigarettes. Although Crisco now markets its shortening as having zero trans fats, it actually still has some (FDA guidelines allow them to market it as such).

So in honor of these important tech milestones, I'll be scarfing down a plate of scones while surfing the Internet this evening. I love history!

Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.