Ben Zotto:

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.

The article itself is interesting, but what drew me in (via kottke.org) was the photo, there at the beginning, of that bottle of official Apple beige touch-up paint.

That shade of beige was Apple’s color for a long time, from that first Apple II case, through the first generation of Macintosh. Since then, we’ve seen shades of gray, returns to platinum, wild runs of neon acrylics, then experiments in aluminum.

But that particular shade of beige is with me forever.