For some reason that was the first thing that came to mind, reading your comment ;-)
The M88K system had big vertically stackable blocks with ribbon cable connectors at the back between the units for power and data. [1] [2] One unit consisted of a tape drive and a floppy drive. The floppy drive was actually SCSI and very fast (over 100kb/s when most floppy drives top out at 25kb/s). I can't imagine how much that drive must have cost.
The system arrived in a massive box and for some bizarre reason they stuffed the empty space with O'Reilly books. There were lots of "read me first" and "read me first" for the read me firsts. I ignored all of them.
About a year later the machine failed. It turned out there was a filter by one of the fans and one of the readme firsts told you to clean it once a month. Eventually the system had overheated and shut down.
We also had a Data General system that used the m88k. They called it the Aviion which was annoying to read and type. The DG folk we dealt with were by far the nicest out of all the vendors. Both the DG system and the Motorola system ran lightly modified SVR4. It was basically Unix of the time, and worked just fine.
The Motorola system ended up acting as the office server for various things because of its high spec. Hold onto your chair - it was blazingly fast at 40MHz, and had a whopping 64MB of memory. At one point we spent a thousand pounds to get a 1GB hard drive and used it as a Usenet server.
[1] Front view: http://www.openbsd.org/images/mvme187-1.jpg
[2] Back view although the system I used didn't have that much networking http://www.openbsd.org/images/mvme187-2.jpg
