By the early 1990s, Apple’s future was already uncertain. The efforts to develop the new Mac desktop OS were at full throttle but spinning their wheels. Before leaving, John Sculley had given the directive to branch out into new markets. One of these markets was in enterprise servers. Differing itself from the earlier Mac OS-based offerings and the Mac OS-compatible in-house Unix, A/UX the Apple Network Server ran real, IBM AIX Unix with no Mac OS underpinnings at all.

The Apple Network Server came in three different offerings. The ANS 500 was the low-end model with a slower 132 MHz 604 processor, 512 kB L2 cache, 44 MHz bus, 32 MB RAM and a single power supply. The ANS 700 featured a 150 MHz 604 processor, 1 MB L2 cache, 50 MHz, 48 MB RAM and dual power supplies. Later ANS 700/200 models shipped with a 200 MHz 604e processor. All ANS models feature hot-swappable drive bays on a two channel wide SCSI-2 bus, 1.44 floppy drive, six PCI slots, external 25-pin SCSI port, ADB, VGA and serial ports.

This ANS 700/150 has been upgraded with a 200 MHz 604e processor card, the maximum 512 MB RAM, Fast 10/100 Apple Ethernet card, CD-ROM, DAT and 4 GB SCSI drives. It boots to AIX for Apple Network Server 4.1.5. It was originally in service with Apple’s Quicktime team before being retired.