Macintosh Quadra 900

The Quadra 900 shipped the same morning as the 700 with the same 68040 at 25MHz and a completely different idea about what a professional machine should look like. The 700 was a low box. The 900 was a tower. Five NuBus slots, room for several internal hard drives, a proper power supply, and a lockable door across the front, which tells you Apple was selling into places where people worried about who could open the case. Ethernet and color video came across from the 700. What the bigger chassis added was cooling and room, and that combination found an audience in desktop video just as the field was becoming possible. Avid and the other early NuBus capture and editing cards wanted a machine you could fill with hardware and then keep running, and the smaller Quadras could not do it as gracefully. Reviewers liked the speed, which was the 700's speed, and singled out the drive bays and the locking door as evidence Apple understood institutional buyers. Broadcast facilities, universities and corporate IT departments bought them. The Quadra 950 replaced it a year later with a faster clock in the same chassis, and this shape was the high point of Apple's NuBus tower before PowerPC changed everything.