Info-Mac

This is day one with a 10 year old Mac. I know this wasn't a swift move but I bought this cheap from a Swap Meet. It is an iMac G3 built in 1998 with OS9.2
I had the seller turn it on and saw the boot screen and said I'd buy it. I always wanted to try out a Mac, I have been using Windows for years. I brought this home powered it up,it gets threw the OS screen and then goes to a Macintosh Manager Server (can't find the server). When I go to find server I get a password screen which I can't get past. I have read on other forums and tried several key stroke bootup options, such as command, option, p & r keys. After initial chime depress those keys until you hear the chime 3 more times. Also the command & S keys. It does nothing different. Of course I purchased without any boot disks. I just wanted to try out the MACs my kids are going off to college they have Windows laptops, just wanted to give them some depth. I have been looking on forums all day, haven't seen anything real useful that I can do unless I have the boot disks. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Tom

If you want to try out a Mac, anything running Mac OS 9 isn't going to give you anything close to an impression of what today's Macs are like. And not just because it's old - Mac OS 9 is literally an entirely different operating system than Mac OS X. They are essentially related in name and location of the Apple menu only. They share 0% codebase and Mac OS X is not even backwards compatible - Mac OS 9 programs will not run in older Mac OS X versions without the "classic mode" virtual Mac OS 9 system being launched... and won't even run in Leopard at all.

This would be synonymous with trying out a late 90s IBM system running OS/2 Warp to "get a feel for what those PCs I keep hearing about are like."

As for Macintosh manager, I'm pretty sure you're not going to get around that without a boot CD. You can find said CDs on eBay - they usually are only a few dollars.