Those really were great computers at the time. It was the first time I could actually afford to buy a new Macintosh, instead of the (very) second hand ones that I used all through school.
Mine was the original bondi blue model and I had it for a number of years. I purchased the OS X Beta (yeah they actually sold it to testers back then) but I reverted back to Mac OS 9 pretty quickly. The hardware was just too slow for unoptimised OS X. With OS 9 it was pretty darned quick though.
I managed to get through quite a bit of college with that old workhorse. This post brings back a lot of good memories, thank you!
I ended up putting OS X 10.3.9 on this which is the latest it supports. It isn't too bad with the RAM maxed out at 512 MB. Not as snappy as OS 9 but you can run more modern software. Just don't try web browsing...
I remember seeing these when they first came out at Comp USA. They were really the first computers to do away with the floppy drive. They were pretty neat computers but by this point I preferred building my own which you just can't do with macs and while these were cheap for macs they were still overpriced for the horsepower you got. Not much has changed in that regard...