It's worth pointing out that this was very much by design. Reset on the Apple II was a warm reset. It provided the ability to break out of a hung, spinning or

It's worth pointing out that this was very much by design. Reset on the Apple II was a warm reset. It provided the ability to break out of a hung, spinning or otherwise misbehaving program and get back to the boot-time monitor prompt in a state where your live in-memory work wasn't lost. Remember the original computer didn't have a disk yet. The only storage was a cassette tape operating at 6000 baud. You didn't hack on it by editting a text file and then compiling it from storage, you programmed in-memory (either in BASIC or by hand-assembling instructions at the monitor). Then you tried it, and if it worked you started worrying about how to get that pickled to storage in a recoverable way. It was a different world, and "reset" was absolutely a critical feature. But yeah, fast forward a few years and the median user was "running" software and not writing it, and we all forgot about why it was there.