I went looking for a defining color of its era. I found it in an old jar of paint.
Apple’s second computer — its first to have a case — launched in 1977, and that boxy beige Apple II was soon everywhere: in classrooms, living rooms and offices. At the vanguard of a generation of personal computers to come, it featured a particular and carefully-chosen beige. But what did that look like? Those first machines — the ones that have escaped landfills anyway — have shifted in color over 40 years. The documented public record is sketchy and confused. But I stumbled upon a way to investigate what Apple Beige was like.
I came by this relic, a remarkable artifact of the fledgling home computer era. It’s a small glass jar filled with an oil-based paint — there’s a little brush built into the cap, and the monochromatic label glued to it sports the old Apple Computer Inc logotype and the title “Apple Beige Touch-Up Paint”.
This is the green-inflected cool beige of the original Apple II computer cases. Unlike later models, these first Apple cases were manufactured with a sprayed-on paint finish. Scrapes and other abuse could damage the surface. Hence the need for a touch-up paint, a handy item apparently available only to dealers for use on their repair benches.
