Mine would have to be the Quadra 900/950 series. Talk about your monster systems of the day... there wasn't anything like them on the market.
Looking at the Quadra 950:
Motorola 68040 at 33 Mhz
16 memory slot for a maximum of 256 MB of RAM
5 NuBus slots and 1 Processor Direct slot
Shipped with 1 MB of VRAM, expandable to 2 MB
Two independent SCSI buses (7 IDs each, one internal, one external)
Room for up to four internal drives, and first to include CD-ROM drive as an option
Built in ethernet
Stereo audio in and out ports
When compared to systems from other venders at the time, it stands out. There were no comparable PCs in 1992, but SGI, Sun and NeXT all had systems in the same power (and price) range.
From Silicon Graphics, the IRIS Indigo Workstation. The system that SGI put up against the Quadra was running an MIPS R3000 processor at 33 MHz (and benchmarked slightly faster than the 68040 at 33 MHz). It had memory expandable up to 96 MB, two expansion slots on the logic board, and the entry level system used an 8 bit graphics board (SGI used a dither effect controlled by the main processor that produced something that look somewhere between 8 bit and 16 bit color on screen). Like the Quadra, this system also included ethernet, audio in and out. There is room for three drives (on a single SCSI bus) and the internal drives are limited in size (hard drives, floppy or tape... no room for a CD-ROM).
SGI had aimed this system squarely at the desktop graphics market. Many people at SGI wore T-shirts with the letters MOM on them... meaning
Move Over Macintosh.
Sun Microsystems was offering the SPARCstation IPX. Also slightly faster than the Quadra, it only had room for one internal hard drive... but the form factor lets you stack up addition parts in a tower (I have such a configuration in front of me right now, made up of two external hard drives, a SPARCclassic and an external CD-ROM drive). It was also limited to 64 MB of RAM. They were advertising these in MacWeek.
And of course there was NeXT's NeXTstation Turbo Color. These systems came with the same 68040 processor at 33 MHz that the Quadras did. They also came with a DSP coprocessor (like the Quadra 840av would later include) and were able to display 16 bit color. Memory topped out at 128 MB of RAM, and there was room for a single SCSI hard drive, they had audio in/out ports, ethernet and used ADB for connecting the keyboard and mouse.
Of course the main difference between the Quadra and it's competitors was that they were all using some form of Unix. The Quadra also had the option of coming with Apple's Unix OS installed. A/UX 3.0.1 runs great on these systems... but it usually jumped the price of the system up by about $1,000.
Anyways, I happen to like the Quadra 900/950 series. I still use a 950 today... and also have an IRIS Indigo and SPARCclassic (a later budget version of the SPARCstation IPX) in my collection. All Titans of the early 90's.
