NeXTstation

Slab

The 'affordable' NeXT — $4,995 instead of $6,500 for the original Cube, and slab-shaped instead of cubic. Where the original Cube shipped with a 25 MHz 68030, the NeXTstation stepped up to a 25 MHz 68040, making it measurably faster for the floating-point-heavy workloads NeXTSTEP favoured. It was deployed heavily in universities, financial institutions, and research labs throughout the early 1990s. Most of the internet infrastructure concepts that became mainstream in the late 1990s were prototyped and proven on machines exactly like this one.