Apple made a lot of beige boxes back in the 1980’s, but for some reason, if you ask someone about their first computer, the Apple IIgs often comes up. The IIgs was originally released on September 15, 1986, and was one of the first Apple computers to use a 16-bit microprocessor. Running at a blistering 2.8 MHz, the “g” and “s” stood for “graphics” and “sound” respectively. The IIgs packed an 8-bit Ensoniq wavetable sound chip that offered 32 separate channels of sound, and a video card that could dazzle the eye with a 12-bit pallet of 4,096 colors. The graphics card could also push graphics in native resolutions of 320 x 200 pixels or 640 x 200 pixels. The IIgs originally came with 256 KB of RAM built-in (later updated to 1.125 MB) and could be upped to 8.125 MB for those power users; the IIgs also included 128 KB of ROM (later updated to 256 KB). You would often see a matching beige floppy drive, keyboard, mouse, and dot-matrix printer hanging off the side of the GS; making this the ultimate Oregon Trail, word processing machine. Anyone out there ever own an Apple IIgs? How about the Woz: Special Edition?
BGR Throwback Thursday is a weekly series covering our (and your) favorite gadgets, games, and software of yesterday and yesteryear.
