Flashback Monday: The Original Apple Store

Its facade wasn't made completely of glass and it wasn't populated by T-shirt clad hipsters eager to tell you about the latest, whazzitcalled, iPhone, but if you lived in Reston in the late 1980s or early 1990s, maybe you could have shown up at the doorstep of Apple's Reston offices off Sunrise Valley Drive and ask them why the handwriting recognition in your fancypants Newton was so unbelievably bad.

Well, maybe not, since the office was for "federal sales," although there were no long lines of bowtie-clad bureaucrats camping out overnight to be the first to get their Performa 475lci to run simulations of their dolphin-bomb-strapping operations in MacPaint. Apple is notoriously secretive about their operations, but some web-logger shared this little anecdote about Apple's Reston office.

In spring 2001, the Apple federal office in Reston, Va., was remodeled to look more like the main campus in Cupertino, Calif. The architect in charge of the remodel removed the large American flag hanging on the lobby wall, since it didn't fit into Apple's design. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, Apple promoted a video on their HR website as they unrolled a huge American flag at 1 Infinite Loop. A quick post to the Can We Talk section pointing out the irony immediately fixed the problem, and the American flag was replaced in the Reston office lobby.

This photo, from the mid-eighties, was also used to celebrate the 10 millionth square foot of office space built in Reston -- more than downtown Richmond, which is really saying something since every midlevel exec's office in Virginia's capital was required to have a few extra square feet to accommodate the obligatory spittoon, the end.