Someone gave me a 1st Generation iMac... What can I do with it?

Glorified word processor? Paperweight?

Frankly, any computer that old (and especially with an abandoned processor architecture) is pretty much useless. You can't upgrade it to anything remotely modern either.

 

You can use it to stop traffic. Throw it out the window, and watch and see what happens. As a matter of fact I was driving to Arby's today for lunch and I saw a mail truck missing his entire driver side wheel. He f-ed up traffic pretty bad and caused an accident that stopped all movement for miles and miles. Fortunately it was southbound and I was going north and luckily knew another route back to work. But yea that old mac you have could be used for something similar.

 

You wouldn't need to worry about malware, but a lot of sites won't even work with IE5.

And OS X wouldn't run on that. It's over a decade old. That would be like trying to run Vista on a Windows 98 computer...

 

Yeah but to be fair Vista probably wouldn't run on most modern PCs.

 

My understanding is that OS9 was a huge PITA. There's a reason it was a gift.

Build a pet robot and use it for the head.

 

Put it on ebay. Seriously. There are Mac collectors out there that will pay something for it.

 

i wouldn't use it as anything other than a word processor
OS9 "Classic" feels a little like Win95, it works but it's clunky
if it has a DVD-rom in it, it's highest purpose is probably a DVD player

 

Why don't you donate it to Teen Challenge, The Junior League, or a church? There might be some kid that could really use it for typing up their book reports or something... that's what I would do.