Oh, Russ, I remember those primitive times!
My favorite console of all time is a classic API. Those opamps and transformers were so gorgeous. API sound is not the cleanest in the world, those opamps have a bit of grit, great for rock and to be honest I’ve seen people use them for classical music as well. But you can modify a classic API to have a clean path and a slightly dirty path, change the opamps, all kinds of things. You can even have a Neve sound inside of a classic API. Make one pair of busses be clean and one be standard API summing. Very versatile. I hate the patchbay layout, though…. Neve and SSL gozouta on the top and gozinta on the bottom is so much more logical than the American way.