I found a IIvi years ago kicking around a used PC shop. The owner tried to snow me for $300.00 'cause he said it "....is a Mac and Macs are very expensive".....um yeah.
Anywho. I talked him down to $30.00 (long story). I brought it home and it needed a new PRAM battery. I used it at school (I'm a teacher) for my reports and general word processing.
Why then am I posting it here? Well, I read the history on this machine and wondered WHY Apple made this when the IIvx was twice as fast? The IIvi was an expensive bird compared to the long lasting IIci (in my opinion one of the easiest older Macs to work on and troubleshoot....heck, I had one acting a FileMaker Server for my students....it ran for 5 years without powering down! It was replaced by a PowerMac 8100/80).
So.
I too dreaded the killer 950 case as well as the PowerMac 8100 series. One had to memorize the sequence when removing the parts to get at the Ram. Sheesh. What a pain!
I never owned a 5300 series of PowerBook although I felt the first generation of Books were dogs.
Interesting stories from fellow Mac-heads.
Check this out:
http://www.nextro.com/nextro/japanese/IIcig3.html