"Apple put it in the iMac in 1998 and excluded all other port types."

and then

"I know the iMac had the irDA port."

Now that you've established that you knew your statement was false when you made it, there's not much point in having a factual discussion with you anymore.

Good day.

> Though USB had been on PC motherboards beginning in 1996,
> nobody did anything with it until Apple put it in the
> iMac in 1998 and excluded all other port types.

That's incorrect, on several core points. First off, as for iMacs having no other ports? Not so much. The original iMac also included the irDA port, through which it supported networking and files transfers and printing.

And all the major PC players were all over USB before the iMac appeared on August 15, 1998:

Compaq - 1997

IBM - February 11, 1998

Dell - January 30, 1998

HP - February 14, 1998

Gateway - March 1, 1998

And those aren't introduction dates, they're just handy examples.

By the way, those listed companies were the top 5 PC makers in Q3 1998, globally and in the US, and they accounted for the strait-up majority of the US PC market at the time.

And Apple sold only a tiny fraction of the USB PCs bought in the era of the early iMac. "USB PC shipments were estimated at 20 million units in 1997 and 100 million units in 1999." So I'll split the difference and say 1998 saw 50 million USB PCs sold. How many were iMacs? Try 0.8 million. So that's 0.8 million versus 50 million. Let's be charitable and call that a 50:1 ratio or 2% of market share. Ouch.

Well, that wasn't a full year. How about 1999? We've seen the overall number of 100 million USB PCs, but in 1999 Apple sold only 1.8 million iMacs. So in 1999 USB iMacs again accounted for roughly 2% of the USB PC market. Still ouch.

So, the iMac was not the first PC with USB, the iMac was not the major but rather a fractionally tiny vector for USB into the marketplace, and the iMac did not "exclude all other port types."