Speaking of upgrading to an Apple IIgs, I remember in high school in 1987 my school wanted to upgrade a classroom that had a few IIe machines to a bunch of IIgs. I begged and pleaded with them not to do it, to go with Mac's or even better PCs, as the IIgs was obvious to me even at the time as a dead end and a room full of them was a huge waste of money. They just accused me of being 'radical and embittered against Apple' because I had an Amiga 2000 at the time that I evangelized for quite a bit. I didn't quite understand their argument, as I had a II+ at home that I still used and enjoyed, and was pushing for Mac's as a viable alternative to the IIgs.

Anyway, they ran a big capital campaign and got the parents to donate a ton of money to buy all these machines. Within a year, they were collecting dust and the school bought a bunch of Mac Plus's and a few PS/2's which got used extensively.

That incident was my first lesson on the propensity of people to obstinately make stupid decisions, and so I always associate the IIgs with that concept. But so that people now don't think I am 'embittered' against the IIgs, I do actually own two of them currently :)

It's a shame Apple killed the Apple ][ line. I would have loved to see what a 32 bit Apple ][ would look like.

Pete Foley worked on something similar while at Apple. See "Other Projects" at

https://web.archive.org/web/20190102164746/http://www.byrdsi...

and the picture "Turbo 6502" in the slide show at the bottom of that page.

I mean, even the IIGS wasn't really an Apple II in a real sense. Classic Apple II programs did use the IIGS' CPU, but were otherwise basically running on the MEGA-II (which I think is also how the Mac LC did Apple compatibility, although I've forgotten). Writing programs for GSOS had more in common with Mac programming than the Apple II, and properly using all of the GS's advanced sound and graphics required entirely different code from an Apple IIe. The 65816 also had a lot of practical issues stemming from the global nature of the 8/16-bit toggle that would've only gotten compounded if you tried to naively extend the architecture to 32-bits.

In the end, yes, I'm very curious what extending the Apple II line would've looked like, in an academic sense. But I suspect that, by the mid-90s, the "Apple II" would've been as technically unrecognizable from the Apple IIe as late 90s PCs were from the original XT: lots of echoes and lots of backwards compatibility, but extremely different when properly and modernly used.