On the TRS-80 Model III, the reset button was a bright red recessed square to the right of the attached keyboard.
It was irresistible to anyone who had no idea what you were doing as you worked, lost in the flow, insensitive to the presence of another human being, until...
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Then there was the Kaypro. Many of their systems had a bug, software or hardware, that would occasionally cause an unplanned reset the first time, after you turned it on, that you tried writing to the disk. Exactly the wrong moment.
Oh, the Apple ][ reset button beat the TRS-80 Model III "hands down" many years earlier, with its "Big Beautiful Reset Button" on the upper right corner of the keyboard.
It was comically vulnerable -- just begging to be pressed. The early models had one so soft and easy to trigger that your cat could reboot your Apple ][ with a single curious paw. Later revisions stiffened the spring a bit, but it was still a menace.
There was a whole cottage industry aftermarket of defensive accessories: plastic shields that slid over the reset key, mail-order kits to reroute it through an auxiliary switch, or firmware mods to require CTRL-RESET. You’d find those in the classified ads in Nibble or Apple Orchard magazines, nestled between ASCII art of wizards and promises to triple your RAM.
Because nothing says "I live dangerously" like writing your 6502 assembly in memory with the mini assembler without saving, then letting your little brother near the keyboard.
I got sweet sweet revenge by writing a "Flakey Keyboard Simulator" in assembly that hooked into the keyboard input vector, that drove him bonkers by occasionally missing, mistyping, and repeating keystrokes, indistinguishable from a real flakey keyboard or drunk typist.
> Because nothing says "I live dangerously" like writing your 6502 assembly in memory with the mini assembler without saving, then letting your little brother near the keyboard.
RESET on the Apple II was a warm reset. You could set a value on page zero so that pressing it caused a cold start (many apps did that), but, even then, the memory is not fully erased on startup, so you'd probably be kind of OK.
