Apple forgets its own lingo sometimes.
Prior to iMac, and excluding PowerBooks and other oddities like MacTV and the like, there were three colors that Apples had come in.
1) Beige-- This is the color of an Apple //e (w/o numeric keypad) and earlier Apple II's; Macintosh 128/512/ke and early pluses; /// and ///plus; Lisa and Lisa 2.
In normal lingo, these are brown computers (case is light brown; keys are darker)
2) [white]--Don't think Apple ever named this color; The original Apple //c was this color. Oddly enough so was the ImageWriter II until the platinum (see below) switchover in 1986-1987. The Imagewriter's never quite matched the //e's and macs of the time until then.
In normal lingo, the //c was white with the keys being pretty close to the light beige that the case of the beige machines were made of.
IMHO these kinda looked like a faded and yellowed platinum machine right out of the box.
3) Platinum.--All computers from the introduction of the Macintosh SE, II and apple IIgs right up until the iMac were this color.
All models had the same color keys and cases with the exception of the Platinum //e which had dark plat. (grey) key caps. The AppleColor Monitor //e also sported this darker color around the screen. Early UniDisk 5.25's may have had that dark color for the drive latch, really can't remember.
Apple seemed to have forgotten its naming of this color as "platinum" when it went Bondi-Blue. Calling identically colored Wintel machines "Beige" confuses the whole 1987 Beige-to Platinum conversion.
Unless.... Apple calls any previous newly obsoletified color scheme "Beige." For instance if in 2007 apple decided that all new Macs were to be gold-plated; the current white and metalic models would be now called "beige."
-Phil
