How do I connect and use an inherited Apple iMac G3/700 SE from 2001?

Good Day!

By "connect," I take it you mean connect to the internet? Well, as they say, that's complicated.

First, what version of OSX 10 is it running? (from "About this Mac.." upper red arrow)

For OSX, the numbers to the right of the "10." are very important for determining your available options. A 2000-2001 iMac can run up to macOS 10.4 "Tiger" if the processor is 400mhz or faster.

Wifi was an extra-cost option for 2001 iMacs. Most G3 iMacs did not have a wifi card unless the computer was ordered as "build-to-order." You can see if yours has a wireless card by clicking "More Info..." in the "About this Mac..." widow to launch System Profiler.

You do, however, have an 10/100BASE-T (RJ-45) networking port for wired networking; an ethernet cable can connect that port to the same ports on your router/modem and you should have internet.

If a wired connection is not feasible, it is unlikely your computer has a wireless card. You can try to find one, but that is not easy today. Your iMac takes only the first-gen Apple Airport card and required an adapter to install the card. That card was limited to wireless 801.11b and that is a dreadfully slow protocol.

USB WiFI "dongles" were hard to setup, and few supported MacOS. What is viable but not cheap if you already have wifi access is an ethernet bridge, also called a network bridge or repeater. It connects to the ethernet port on the iMac and detects your local wireless network.

HOWEVER...

Before you run off to buy stuff, STOP! Most people in your iMac shoes find there are two dealbreakers:

—there are very few web pages any more that are compatible with the version of Safari that came with old macOS versions. The old workabout was TenFourFox (https://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/) but it is now unsupported. It also does not play video content. It is dreadfully slow even on on a much faster PPC Mac than yours. I know—we still have a working eMac G4 1.42Ghz I use for testing. For your iMac, it would require upgrading to macOS 10.4 "Tiger" if the iMac is not there now, which painfully brings up the second dealbreaker:

—Apple never released free downloads of any macOS version older than 10.7 "Lion," which will not run on your iMac. You must find genuine Apple OS retail installer disks on CD unless your iMac has a DVD drive (a rare option in 2001). Figuratively speaking, you will be digging for a diamond in a minefield.

Old macOS installers are still in demand, and that means that for every legit installer offered for sale, there are 20 fakes or other misrepresentations that are unlikely to work. A real Tiger retail install disk looks like this:

I love keeping old Macs in use, and am not fond of putting out others' campfires. However, I would be remiss should I fail to point out the potholes in the road you are about to travel.

Regards, AJ

If you're trying to use that computer to browse the Internet, you are going to run into multiple problems.

• As mentioned, the AirPort (802.11b) card was optional. If that Mac doesn't already have one, a compatible one may be hard to find. Even if you have an AirPort card, it's unlikely you would be able to connect to any modern Wi-Fi router that is set up to use WPA2 or WPA3 security. I seriously doubt that that old card is able to handle anything other than WEP or TKIP. WEP was found to provide no real security all; and TKIP was what networking vendors came up with as a stop-gap in the early days, when their products were not able to support AES.
• That Mac does have a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port, so you could run an Ethernet cable to the LAN port of a router to avoid all the complications of obsolete forms of Wi-Fi.
• However, there have been major changes in Web standards over the years. The original version of https security was found to be much weaker than people thought, and there was a movement to upgrade both browsers and Web sites with new, stronger forms of https security. The browsers available for that old Mac don't know how to use the new forms of security, and so chances are that modern https Web sites will refuse to accept connections from that old Mac on the grounds that the connections are too insecure.
• Even if you find Web sites that don't reject you outright on security grounds, there have been numerous changes to Web standards that deal with presentation of Web pages. The browsers that run on that old iMac may simply be incapable of dealing with the formatting of many Web sites.

AnkushRoy_theiMacenthusist wrote:

I also use a first gen airport card by the way

That saved you a lot of work. I don't have a Mac running Jag any more but, under your control panels, I recall we started with "Network." Let us know.

A site the still runs on really old macOS and Safari versions was the speed test site, fast.com. I've recently accessed it from PPC Macs running 10.5 so am fairly sure you could at least use that as at test page.

If you bought a used, retail (universal) install Tiger disk (as shown in the photo that Allan included), it would be a DVD. Unfortunately, your iMac has a CD-RW drive. I suspect that the Tiger installer you downloaded was for another model Mac having an incompatible software build for your iMac. Attempting to install it would produce the error message that you saw.

The regrettable thing about advances in technology is that older computers having nothing "wrong" with them are left behind in the dust, simply because of their functional, but outdated hardware. While the computer can still run the old programs that it shipped with, dated internet browsers are no longer acceptable. I see much newer computers than your iMac being dropped off at the recycling center because of non-upgradable limitations.

I bought a tiger disc and successfully downloaded it. However, when I used an Ethernet cable it always said this iMac doesn’t support the version used

That's the minefield. Few older Macs take to burned installer disks. I think few burned disk are in the format old Macs like.

What does "About this Mac.." for your processor speed?