The optical disk was such a terrible choice. As an option? Sure. As the primary disk for a system reliant — like nothing that came before it — on fast swapping to virtual memory for interactive perf? Yikes.

(Of course, it was also fundamentally a Unix workstation and still had a lot of rough edges that the classic Mac, for example, didn’t have. And those edges were so rough they didn’t get fully sanded down until approx. Mac OS X 10.2 - 10.4.)