From Bethesda Magazine: A Chevy Chase man’s museum of Apple

32 retro computers make up Jeff Rule’s antique collection

March 26, 2026 3:00 p.m. | Updated: March 24, 2026 4:38 p.m.

Jeff Rule and his Apple computer — Jeff Rule holding an Apple Macintosh Performa 275 from 1993. Photo credit: Skip Brown

Jeff Rule, 57, is in his Chevy Chase basement tapping a computer keyboard to pull up a video game. Next to the machine sit two floppy disk drives that take those old 5¼-inch disks. He selects Archon, a game that came out more than 40 years ago. The time warp to 1983 in the room isn’t limited to this Apple IIe computer, though it’s the most treasured machine in his collection of Apple products. Rule’s dad bought it for him for Christmas that year.

“[A teacher at school] talked to my dad about it, said I was super interested in computers,” says Rule, who was 14 and living in Fairfax, Virginia, when he received the gift. “The day I got it I was super excited because I knew a bunch of stuff. I actually copied a bunch of software off the school computers and brought them home.”

Also in his basement is the Macintosh SE he took to Virginia Tech, where he majored in biochemistry before deciding he would rather work with computers. Rule retired last August from a career that included jobs at the Discovery Channel, National Geographic and Capital One, working in web development and, most recently, AI and machine learning.

His collection of 32 retro computers isn’t a graveyard—the machines work. “Call it quality. The Apple computers almost never die,” he says. He keeps about nine on display—and in use, mainly for gaming—in his basement at a time. “My wife [Allison] calls it ‘The Apple Store.’ She comes down and she’s like, ‘Hey, you sold anything today?’ ” he says. “I think as long as I keep it presentable, she thinks it’s an attractive display.”

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Looking for a hobby during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rule started shopping on Craigslist to build his collection. By then, he already owned a handful of older Apple computers, including a black Macintosh TV that he bought from another enthusiast in Pennsylvania. That machine was marketed for dorm rooms. “You could plug a cable feed into the back of it so you could watch picture-in-picture cable at the same time you were doing your regular computing,” Rule says. Apple sold fewer than 10,000 of them, he says, at a price he couldn’t afford at the time.

“I’m a much bigger fan of, let’s say, the underdog retro Apple, than the current Apple. The current Apple is kind of hard to root for. They’re kind of monopolistic,” Rule says. “But generally, anything from that six-color logo time frame [1977 to 1998] is the time frame that I’m mainly interested in.”

His collection also includes games and multimedia software in original boxes. Other software boxes are re-creations he made by using Adobe Photoshop to copy the packaging and then attaching a large printout to a plain box. He’s also come up with his own containers for products that Apple tried to launch but never hit the shelves. “Apple was always trying stuff and failing at it, or doing things way too early,” he says. “They left these cool kind of artifacts.”

One box he created is for an Apple TV set-top box that debuted in 1994 as a limited trial and never took off. Another is for Apple’s browser Cyberdog, which the company put out in the late ’90s and also wasn’t successful (the fake box holds a real developer’s manual and CD-ROM for the beta version that Apple released). Rule recently used AI to enhance blurry images he found online and produce a box for Knowledge Navigator, a demo by Apple in 1987 that had an AI voice agent that answered your questions (like an early version of Siri).

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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine