Apple II Bits

Thank you to everyone who voted in the poll to help me choose a Massachusetts license plate that best invokes the Apple II! The path toward the most popular choice has now concluded.

In the first round, I proposed eight candidates, and from reader comments added 36 more. I put those 44 up for vote, allowing each person to choose their favorite five. Eighty votes were cast, narrowing the pool from 44 to nine that had received five votes or more each:

AAPL2 APLIIE APLTWO

ATEBIT IIGS JUCDGS

KFEST ONEMHZ PRODOS

ATEBIT was actually too late a submission to make it into this final round, but I included it for what I saw as its broad appeal. I grew up playing games more on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) than on the Apple II, and I still consider myself something of a retrogamer, with frequent visits to the American Classic Arcade Museum. ATEBIT can apply as much to that interest as it does to the Apple II, making it more of a proud label and less of an inside joke.

I put those nine options up and asked you to choose just one. I didn’t vote, but I would’ve been quite comfortable ruling out options like AAPL2 (where’s the extra ‘A’ come from, other than Apple’s stock ticker?), APLIIE (I’m more of a GS man myself), and ONEMHZ (better for Carrington’s show than my own.

I didn’t vote in this round, leaving it to you, the readers, to decide. Thirty-eight votes later, here are the results…

Since everyone interprets data differently, I thought I’d have some fun and present the numbers in a variety of ways for you to absorb. First, a bar graph:

Turn it on its side, and you get a column graph:

All that color have you distracted? Let’s look at the data points:

Here’s something that’s better than cake: pie!

For all you Homer Simpsons out there, here’s a donut:

And just to be totally weird, a radar:

No matter how you look at it, the results are the same: IIGS and PRODOS are your top choices. They’re obvious allusions to the machines that require no manipulation or conversion from their original names to the standards of the DMV. But will non-geeks get the reference? I’d like to hear some qualitative commentary from anyone who voted as your thought process behind this selection!

I can’t guarantee I will be getting this or any other vanity plate anytime soon, but it’s good to know what would make the best impression when I roll into KansasFest. Thanks to everyone who entered!

Now — what part of my life should I make retro next?