One more thought: It's really interesting to see what Macs people like and don't like, and for what reasons. I finally got my hands on a 6100 a little earlier this year and I've liked it a lot. It's a lot of stuff in a relatively convenient form factor, and I've sort of fallen in love with the 610 and 6100 from a "product" perspective because they did get a 5.25-inch bay in there (my 6100 has a CD-ROM drive in it), they had internal expansion available, but it was a successor to the LC pizza boxes in that it was sort of presumed you weren't going to go too wild with expansion.
I also liked the idea of the later 6000 series machines, let's just call it the "6200" and the "6400" even though of course the heritage is slightly more complicated than that. That always appealed to me firstly because it was similar to the SGI Indigo and Octane, and a few other UNIX systems based around backplanes. The other idea that I don't think Apple ever executed on but I thought would have been really neat for the era was for them to sell the motherboards separate from the rest of the system, so that you could hypothetically buy a 300MHz motherboard to install in your 6200 or 5200 after a few years. (which might have helped reduce some of the bad feelings some 5200/6200 owners have toward Apple for the level of the performance of those machines as they got on in age.)
This is out in left field, but even though it would have changed (or possibly made some options impossible) a few things, it would have been neat to see the 6100 use the same modular enclosure as the 6200 and friends, and for there to have been an all-in one Mac with a 601 in it, a "5100" if you will. The other neat thing that this particular modularity might have led to a G3 motherboard for the 5000/6000 family. (The other other thing I would have liked is for Apple to keep that desktop enclosure longer, maybe even instead of ever introducing the 4400/7220.)
Anyway, I actually like the 6100 a lot, both because it really feels "Apple" and because it was very appropriate for a time when Apple was working very hard to create a platform with a lot of choices, and the choices were the lightly expandable basic desktop, the three-slot midrange desktop, and the highly expandable tower.
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I also liked the idea of the later 6000 series machines, let's just call it the "6200" and the "6400" even though of course the heritage is slightly more complicated than that. That always appealed to me firstly because it was similar to the SGI Indigo and Octane, and a few other UNIX systems based around backplanes. The other idea that I don't think Apple ever executed on but I thought would have been really neat for the era was for them to sell the motherboards separate from the rest of the system, so that you could hypothetically buy a 300MHz motherboard to install in your 6200 or 5200 after a few years. (which might have helped reduce some of the bad feelings some 5200/6200 owners have toward Apple for the level of the performance of those machines as they got on in age.)
This is out in left field, but even though it would have changed (or possibly made some options impossible) a few things, it would have been neat to see the 6100 use the same modular enclosure as the 6200 and friends, and for there to have been an all-in one Mac with a 601 in it, a "5100" if you will. The other neat thing that this particular modularity might have led to a G3 motherboard for the 5000/6000 family. (The other other thing I would have liked is for Apple to keep that desktop enclosure longer, maybe even instead of ever introducing the 4400/7220.)
Anyway, I actually like the 6100 a lot, both because it really feels "Apple" and because it was very appropriate for a time when Apple was working very hard to create a platform with a lot of choices, and the choices were the lightly expandable basic desktop, the three-slot midrange desktop, and the highly expandable tower.
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