One of the best computers I've owned was a Power Computing
machine. During the late 1990's, Apple tried to increase
their market share by allowing Mac clones. Unfortunately,
the business plan did not make sense and the MacOS clone
program was cancelled when Steve Jobs ousted Gil Amelio in
July 1997.
I bought a
PowerCenter Pro in May of 1997. At the
time, Apple did not have a Mac that matched Power
Computing in terms of performance and price. It has a
PowerPC 604e running at 210 MHz. I got it with dual
4.3Gb drives and 512Mb of RAM. It was my primary
machine from 1997 to 2001 and acted as a Linux server
from 2001 until I sold it in 2003. With a partitioned
hard drive, I was also able to run BeOS and MkLinux
during a time when many Mac users were looking at a
bleak Windows-only future (that would be the time when
"Apple" and "beleaguered" were always used in the same
sentence).
The definitive site for Power Computing information is
PowerWatch.
I was such a Power Computing fan that I created a
web page showing the capabilities
of the PCP 210. I have since returned to the Apple
fold with the introduction of MacOS X.