9 ms·

Let’s Repair an Ancient Macintosh SE/30, Part 2

93 points by bifrost 8y ago

jason_slack 8y ago
Ancient? I'm almost 41 and the machine is about 35? Poor me and everyone else over 36 :-)
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Lucky you I remember when it came out ;) That should make you feel better.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    The SE/30 is the model that came out after my first Macintosh's model. "Ancient."
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      I will raise you my KIM-1.
      - stcredzero 8y ago
        I lose. The best I can do is an Apple ][+ 48k.
        jacquesm 8y ago
        No, I lose, it probably means I'm slightly older than you ;)
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  I believe it'll be 30 next year, actually. I'm 46 and got an SE/30 as a freshman at Drexel U in 1989, the year the SE/30 was released.
  - jason_slack 8y ago
    For me it was a PowerMac 6100
- vidarh 8y ago
  I'm 43. I remember the launch of the Mac. And the Amiga. And the Commodore 64. I feel very old now. Though not as old as when my 9 year old found out that I didn't have Youtube as a child and followed it up by asking if we had electricity back then...
  - jason_slack 8y ago
    Classic 9 year olds comment! That made me laugh. Thanks.
news_to_me 8y ago
I'm currently trying to rig up a Macintosh Plus I bought with a scsi2sd hard drive and internet connection. It's fun! But I've also discovered just how long a history Apple has of choosing "technically better, but much less well adopted" tech in their products. For instance: - That RS-232 port in the back? Haha, nope! It's RS-422, which looks the same except it has a different pin layout. Adapters exist, of course, but 232 is much more common. - 3.5" floppies - neat, I remember this form factor from my childhood fondly. Wait.. no, these are 400k or 800k special format floppies, which aren't interchangeable :( I'm pretty close to getting a working dev environment on it though, and then the sky is the limit :)
- rjsw 8y ago
  What are you missing for a dev environment ? Both MPW and Think C are available to download. Slightly newer Macs are easier to use, particularly if they have ethernet, you can run Netatalk on a UNIX system to provide a file server. You can use any 3.5" floppy in an FDHD drive.
  - news_to_me 8y ago
    Yeah I'll just download MPW. But I need to get the hard disk working and set up a rasberry pi as an internet modem first.
- eschaton 8y ago
  Rather than assuming that choices were made to confirm your biases, you might want to take a look at what the engineering realities were when the choices were made. For example, you write as though there was a standard for low-level formatting of 3.5in floppy disks when Apple made the switch from Twiggy to Sony drives for Macintosh, and as though Apple intentionally chose not to use it. Furthermore, Apple’s choice of GCR encoding probably had to do with not changing the hardware design too much as part of the switch; using MFM would’ve required a different floppy controller and therefore also different signaling, etc. Engineering trade-offs, not some sort of “Let’s be different!” aspiration. When Apple adopted high density floppies, there a standard, so Apple used it and the low-level format used (MFM) was in fact compatible across vendors. That’s why you can still read and write such disks in a USB floppy drive today.
gvb 8y ago
Part 1: https://spun.io/2018/04/23/lets-repair-an-ancient-macintosh-se-30-part-1-looks-like-its-broken/ https://spun.io/2018/04/23/lets-repair-an-ancient-macintosh-...
wwweston 8y ago
Hey! This "simasimac" thing appears to be exactly the problem I have with my SE/30. I was planning to get A/UX on the thing a few years ago and see what I could still do with it when the failure appeared and I kindof shelved the whole thing. Happy to have a log I can draw tips from.
chongli 8y ago
This is fantastic. I own a Macintosh Classic that still worked fine the last time I booted it up (about a year ago). I've been afraid to keep it powered on for very long lest the capacitors leak. When I get some time (probably after school) I will look at replacing all of the capacitors with tantalum. Then see about finding a way to connect it to the network. There's so much classic Mac software out there to be used. It's actually pretty amazing how productive you can be on a machine so many orders of magnitude slower than today's computers. The low latency of the classic Mac UI is a testament to the genius and hard work of Bill Atkinson. [1] [1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=I_Still_Remember_Regions.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&topic=QuickDraw https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
- jackvalentine 8y ago
  I’ve been thinking several years now practically nothing I do at work on a computer can’t be done on a computer from 1995. The tools have been improved a bit and made worse in other places but the basic work if you’re not in a compute heavy field is pretty much the same.
  - dddddaviddddd 8y ago
    Lack of support for modern ciphers and secure protocols becomes a deal-breaker pretty quickly if you need to access the internet much (including third-party email servers).
    - boomlinde 8y ago
      I wouldn' be surprised if you run NetBSD or even OpenBSD on a 1995 computer. There's your modern ciphers and secure protocols.
      - vidarh 8y ago
        NetBSD can run on most Amiga's with a MMU and 24MB or better [1]. That's either an A3000 (1990) with memory expansion or pretty much any model with a 68020 + MMU + RAM accelerator board. I don't know if you could get it to run on an Amiga 1000, but certainly on a 500 or 2000. So a 1987 computer... Though most of the accelerator boards that are easy to obtain today are newly manufactured FPGA based ones... (NetBSD will probably run on older hardware than that too - it's just I remember people running it on Amiga's, so it's the one I'm aware of) [1] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/
dcminter 8y ago
Where does the "simasimac" name of the failure mode come from?
- duskwuff 8y ago
  "simasima" is allegedly a Japanese word referring to a striped pattern.
  - news_to_me 8y ago
    Confirmed: https://jisho.org/word/%E7%B8%9E%E3%80%85 https://jisho.org/word/%E7%B8%9E%E3%80%85 Although the more common romanization would have it "shimashima"
nategri 8y ago
I've got a 512k, a plus, a classic, and an se, but I've always wanted an se/30 because it's probably the oldest mac you can run linux on [1]. [1] http://lowendmac.com/unix/02/0319.html http://lowendmac.com/unix/02/0319.html
- Someone 8y ago
  The Macintosh XL (aka Apple Lisa) ran Xenix (https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2009/02/10/apple-lisa-xenix/ https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2009/02/10/apple-lisa-xen...), so Linux probably could be ported to it.
peterburkimsher 8y ago
My first Mac was a broken Mac Plus that my dad gave me when I was 8 years old. He said that if I fixed it, I could keep it! I didn't solder on new capacitors - I just got some screwdrivers and replaced the motherboard. http://peterburk.github.io/blog/#theAppleGrows http://peterburk.github.io/blog/#theAppleGrows I've collected a few old Macs, including two SE/30s, a load of LCs, Quadras, and Performas, and even some older Apple IIc, IIgs, and IIe models, and newer coloured iMacs. I also have a box of iBook G3 parts, including AirPort cards. Right now they're in the grenier of my parents' house, and I'm starting to admit that I won't get a chance to use them often. I'm sure there's value in it all, but I'd just prefer that they go to someone who truly values the machines. If you live near Geneva or want to pay shipping, then please get in touch.
jasonjayr 8y ago
I intercepted a SE/30 that was set to be discarded (in the late 90's), due to a video problem -- the image was a single line across the center. The solder for the vertical control had cracked and it turned out, all I needed to do was reflow it, and it was good to go. Since this was my first 'spare' computer, I promptly installed NetBSD on it, and learned unix there. I eventually got a modem attached to it, setup PPP, and got a serial console to another 8086 laptop someone else gave me, that my brother and used to run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAC_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAC_(software) to chat into the evening. I got a nuBus Network card on there too, and figured out how to wire up our main family computer too! A year or so later, I learned about Flyback Transformers and precisely how large of a capacitor was in the vicinity, and thanked my lucky stars I didn't accidentally discharge it. The Se/30 will always be a special machine for me :)
dlevine 8y ago
I had an SE/30 in college that I got for free somewhere (this was in the early 2000s). It worked fine, but I didn't have a network adapter that would get it on the network, so it was of limited use to me. I think it was still sitting in my parents' garage last time I looked. Apparently (according to someone I went to college with), Apple postfixed the names of their computers with 68030 processors 'x' (eg IIfx). They couldn't call it the SEx, so they broke convention and called it the SE/30.
- kabdib 8y ago
  At one point early in the Mac's history, Apple marketing tried to tell the world that SCSI was pronounced "Sexy", rather than "Scuzzy". I guess they'd finally been told the name of the machine's hard drive port and someone got unhappy. This attempted name change went over about as well as you would expect. [I think they could have capitalized on the SE/x and done a really good marketing campaign if they'd not been terrified. On the other hand, opinions like this are one of the reasons I'm an engineer and not a marketing type... :-) ]
- labster 8y ago
  As the owner of an iPhone SE, I'm still hoping Apple releases a iPhone SE/30.
  - bifrost 8y ago
    YES!
1800walrus 8y ago
And then when one of those tantalum capacitors exhibits combustion mode failure due to Dv/Dt, the whole thing will go up in smoke...
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
"Ancient?" Kids today huh!? ;) These old computers are very easy to work on and there are plenty out there in broken or semi-working state in need of rescue. Good work saving another classic from the scrapheap!
jamesfmilne 8y ago
I’ve been collecting compact Macs over the last year or so. I’ve got 3 SE/30s and one SE. My most recent SE/30 exhibited this failure, but came back to life after I repaired all the axial and SMD capacitors. I currently have it working with 80MB of RAM, and a SCSI2SD. It’s got the following OS installed: * System 7.5.5 * A/UX 3.1 * NetBSD 6 * debian Linux I’m currently working with one of my electronics guru colleagues on designing a new PDS slot 100Mbit Ethernet card for the SE/30, using a modern Ethernet interface chip, since working Ethernet cards are getting hard to come by.

93 points by bifrost 8y ago

jason_slack 8y ago

Ancient? I'm almost 41 and the machine is about 35? Poor me and everyone else over 36 :-)

jacquesm 8y ago
Lucky you I remember when it came out ;) That should make you feel better.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  The SE/30 is the model that came out after my first Macintosh's model. "Ancient."
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    I will raise you my KIM-1.
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      I lose. The best I can do is an Apple ][+ 48k.
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        No, I lose, it probably means I'm slightly older than you ;)
jonhendry18 8y ago
I believe it'll be 30 next year, actually. I'm 46 and got an SE/30 as a freshman at Drexel U in 1989, the year the SE/30 was released.
- jason_slack 8y ago
  For me it was a PowerMac 6100
vidarh 8y ago
I'm 43. I remember the launch of the Mac. And the Amiga. And the Commodore 64. I feel very old now. Though not as old as when my 9 year old found out that I didn't have Youtube as a child and followed it up by asking if we had electricity back then...
- jason_slack 8y ago
  Classic 9 year olds comment! That made me laugh. Thanks.

news_to_me 8y ago

I'm currently trying to rig up a Macintosh Plus I bought with a scsi2sd hard drive and internet connection. It's fun! But I've also discovered just how long a history Apple has of choosing "technically better, but much less well adopted" tech in their products. For instance: - That RS-232 port in the back? Haha, nope! It's RS-422, which looks the same except it has a different pin layout. Adapters exist, of course, but 232 is much more common. - 3.5" floppies - neat, I remember this form factor from my childhood fondly. Wait.. no, these are 400k or 800k special format floppies, which aren't interchangeable :( I'm pretty close to getting a working dev environment on it though, and then the sky is the limit :)

rjsw 8y ago
What are you missing for a dev environment ? Both MPW and Think C are available to download. Slightly newer Macs are easier to use, particularly if they have ethernet, you can run Netatalk on a UNIX system to provide a file server. You can use any 3.5" floppy in an FDHD drive.
- news_to_me 8y ago
  Yeah I'll just download MPW. But I need to get the hard disk working and set up a rasberry pi as an internet modem first.
eschaton 8y ago
Rather than assuming that choices were made to confirm your biases, you might want to take a look at what the engineering realities were when the choices were made. For example, you write as though there was a standard for low-level formatting of 3.5in floppy disks when Apple made the switch from Twiggy to Sony drives for Macintosh, and as though Apple intentionally chose not to use it. Furthermore, Apple’s choice of GCR encoding probably had to do with not changing the hardware design too much as part of the switch; using MFM would’ve required a different floppy controller and therefore also different signaling, etc. Engineering trade-offs, not some sort of “Let’s be different!” aspiration. When Apple adopted high density floppies, there a standard, so Apple used it and the low-level format used (MFM) was in fact compatible across vendors. That’s why you can still read and write such disks in a USB floppy drive today.

gvb 8y ago

Part 1: https://spun.io/2018/04/23/lets-repair-an-ancient-macintosh-se-30-part-1-looks-like-its-broken/ https://spun.io/2018/04/23/lets-repair-an-ancient-macintosh-...

wwweston 8y ago

Hey! This "simasimac" thing appears to be exactly the problem I have with my SE/30. I was planning to get A/UX on the thing a few years ago and see what I could still do with it when the failure appeared and I kindof shelved the whole thing. Happy to have a log I can draw tips from.

chongli 8y ago

This is fantastic. I own a Macintosh Classic that still worked fine the last time I booted it up (about a year ago). I've been afraid to keep it powered on for very long lest the capacitors leak. When I get some time (probably after school) I will look at replacing all of the capacitors with tantalum. Then see about finding a way to connect it to the network. There's so much classic Mac software out there to be used. It's actually pretty amazing how productive you can be on a machine so many orders of magnitude slower than today's computers. The low latency of the classic Mac UI is a testament to the genius and hard work of Bill Atkinson. [1] [1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=I_Still_Remember_Regions.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&topic=QuickDraw https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

jackvalentine 8y ago
I’ve been thinking several years now practically nothing I do at work on a computer can’t be done on a computer from 1995. The tools have been improved a bit and made worse in other places but the basic work if you’re not in a compute heavy field is pretty much the same.
- dddddaviddddd 8y ago
  Lack of support for modern ciphers and secure protocols becomes a deal-breaker pretty quickly if you need to access the internet much (including third-party email servers).
  - boomlinde 8y ago
    I wouldn' be surprised if you run NetBSD or even OpenBSD on a 1995 computer. There's your modern ciphers and secure protocols.
    - vidarh 8y ago
      NetBSD can run on most Amiga's with a MMU and 24MB or better [1]. That's either an A3000 (1990) with memory expansion or pretty much any model with a 68020 + MMU + RAM accelerator board. I don't know if you could get it to run on an Amiga 1000, but certainly on a 500 or 2000. So a 1987 computer... Though most of the accelerator boards that are easy to obtain today are newly manufactured FPGA based ones... (NetBSD will probably run on older hardware than that too - it's just I remember people running it on Amiga's, so it's the one I'm aware of) [1] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/

dcminter 8y ago

Where does the "simasimac" name of the failure mode come from?

duskwuff 8y ago
"simasima" is allegedly a Japanese word referring to a striped pattern.
- news_to_me 8y ago
  Confirmed: https://jisho.org/word/%E7%B8%9E%E3%80%85 https://jisho.org/word/%E7%B8%9E%E3%80%85 Although the more common romanization would have it "shimashima"

nategri 8y ago

I've got a 512k, a plus, a classic, and an se, but I've always wanted an se/30 because it's probably the oldest mac you can run linux on [1]. [1] http://lowendmac.com/unix/02/0319.html http://lowendmac.com/unix/02/0319.html

Someone 8y ago
The Macintosh XL (aka Apple Lisa) ran Xenix (https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2009/02/10/apple-lisa-xenix/ https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2009/02/10/apple-lisa-xen...), so Linux probably could be ported to it.

peterburkimsher 8y ago

My first Mac was a broken Mac Plus that my dad gave me when I was 8 years old. He said that if I fixed it, I could keep it! I didn't solder on new capacitors - I just got some screwdrivers and replaced the motherboard. http://peterburk.github.io/blog/#theAppleGrows http://peterburk.github.io/blog/#theAppleGrows I've collected a few old Macs, including two SE/30s, a load of LCs, Quadras, and Performas, and even some older Apple IIc, IIgs, and IIe models, and newer coloured iMacs. I also have a box of iBook G3 parts, including AirPort cards. Right now they're in the grenier of my parents' house, and I'm starting to admit that I won't get a chance to use them often. I'm sure there's value in it all, but I'd just prefer that they go to someone who truly values the machines. If you live near Geneva or want to pay shipping, then please get in touch.

jasonjayr 8y ago

I intercepted a SE/30 that was set to be discarded (in the late 90's), due to a video problem -- the image was a single line across the center. The solder for the vertical control had cracked and it turned out, all I needed to do was reflow it, and it was good to go. Since this was my first 'spare' computer, I promptly installed NetBSD on it, and learned unix there. I eventually got a modem attached to it, setup PPP, and got a serial console to another 8086 laptop someone else gave me, that my brother and used to run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAC_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAC_(software) to chat into the evening. I got a nuBus Network card on there too, and figured out how to wire up our main family computer too! A year or so later, I learned about Flyback Transformers and precisely how large of a capacitor was in the vicinity, and thanked my lucky stars I didn't accidentally discharge it. The Se/30 will always be a special machine for me :)

dlevine 8y ago

I had an SE/30 in college that I got for free somewhere (this was in the early 2000s). It worked fine, but I didn't have a network adapter that would get it on the network, so it was of limited use to me. I think it was still sitting in my parents' garage last time I looked. Apparently (according to someone I went to college with), Apple postfixed the names of their computers with 68030 processors 'x' (eg IIfx). They couldn't call it the SEx, so they broke convention and called it the SE/30.

kabdib 8y ago
At one point early in the Mac's history, Apple marketing tried to tell the world that SCSI was pronounced "Sexy", rather than "Scuzzy". I guess they'd finally been told the name of the machine's hard drive port and someone got unhappy. This attempted name change went over about as well as you would expect. [I think they could have capitalized on the SE/x and done a really good marketing campaign if they'd not been terrified. On the other hand, opinions like this are one of the reasons I'm an engineer and not a marketing type... :-) ]
labster 8y ago
As the owner of an iPhone SE, I'm still hoping Apple releases a iPhone SE/30.
- bifrost 8y ago
  YES!

1800walrus 8y ago

And then when one of those tantalum capacitors exhibits combustion mode failure due to Dv/Dt, the whole thing will go up in smoke...

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

"Ancient?" Kids today huh!? ;) These old computers are very easy to work on and there are plenty out there in broken or semi-working state in need of rescue. Good work saving another classic from the scrapheap!

jamesfmilne 8y ago

I’ve been collecting compact Macs over the last year or so. I’ve got 3 SE/30s and one SE. My most recent SE/30 exhibited this failure, but came back to life after I repaired all the axial and SMD capacitors. I currently have it working with 80MB of RAM, and a SCSI2SD. It’s got the following OS installed: * System 7.5.5 * A/UX 3.1 * NetBSD 6 * debian Linux I’m currently working with one of my electronics guru colleagues on designing a new PDS slot 100Mbit Ethernet card for the SE/30, using a modern Ethernet interface chip, since working Ethernet cards are getting hard to come by.