14 ms·

My New Old Macintosh SE/30 Computer

106 points by whatrocks 5y ago

mistrial9 5y ago
score! Honestly I like BBEdit to this day for text, and the vector drawing programs. No mention of postscript printing, but that works well (pre-Level III postscript). Very fast interface for most things, even faster than many desktop computers today for native Mac software. I definitely kept my OS install disks and amenities, but it is somewhat humbling to read about entire ROMs and SCSI hacks here.. not easy! very nice to see it on YNews.
- mrkstu 5y ago
  Mac/Claris Draw is still more usable than anything comparable today and therefore the effective power is almost as much for non-pro users.
Bud 5y ago
I still have my old SE/30. It's still working. Has the Ethernet card installed, so it's even marginally useful. I also picked up my old 512k "Fat" Mac from my aunt's house where I had it stored for 20 years. Powered it up. Bright white screen, perfectly sharp, works perfectly. Not bad for a machine that debuted in 1984.
- wwweston 5y ago
  Would you say it's worth getting an ethernet card and fixing one with screen (likely leaky cap) issues? I've got one that I've wondered might be a good connected-but-not-TOO-connected device.
  - Bud 5y ago
    If you're a real Mac lover? Definitely. I used to use mine all the time as a very fancy vt100 terminal for an old Apollo server I had, and also to telnet to a BBS I was running in the late 90s. It's a great conversation piece, too.
  - floren 5y ago
    If you haven't already, you should open it up and remove the PRAM battery. I've seen what happens when the battery bursts and then sits for a few years... not pretty. The caps aren't as big of a deal in comparison, they just need to be replaced when you want to use it.
    - zargon 5y ago
      The caps are a big deal, just not as bad as the battery. The caps leak corrosive electrolytic fluid which eats traces and corrodes component legs. Most un-restored SE/30s require trace repairs at this point due to leaky caps. The longer the original caps remain the more extensive the repairs.
  - twmiller 5y ago
    Also own a Mac SE/30 and pretty much went through the hoops that the linked article did, only I did all of it myself. I also picked up an ethernet card for it because I had a retro-computer connection who got me one for a really good price (like, an AMAZINGLY good price). Otherwise, the network adapters for the SE/30's PDS slot are pretty rare and usually very expensive. A far less expensive option is to get a Pi Zero, a USB-to-serial adapter, and a Apple-to-9-pin null modem cable. You can set up SLIRP on the pi running linux and then use a PPP modem driver to connect to the internet on the se/30. You're stuck at serial port speeds, but honestly for most of what you want to do on a computer this old (irc, bbsing, file transfers of se/30 sized files) it's actually pretty solid. I use the pi zero / serial interface for a bunch of my old computers that don't have proper network adapters.
- chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
  Which ethernet card do you have? I have a saved ebay search but nothing has popped up recently
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    You could emulate one with an ESP32 or something and have wifi. The bus is only 16 MHz, slow enough for a modern microcontroller to bit-bang.
gnu8 5y ago
Besides all of the software listed, that machine would also be a prime A/UX rig with that amount of RAM installed
- whatrocks 5y ago
  I'm going to add this to my to-do list.
  - gnu8 5y ago
    I look forward to reading about your experience with it!
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Hear, hear! A/UX was a great OS, with an OS9 GUI on/with X11. Worked fine in 8MB. (Note: not GB, MB!) I still have my SE/30. Need to replace some caps and boot it...
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Was OS 7.
assttoasstmgr 5y ago
Can someone explain why removal (as opposed to replacement) of the PRAM battery is necessary? How is this different from any other CMOS motherboard battery? Is there a fault in the circuitry that causes the battery to fail catastrophically?
- torgoguys 5y ago
  Those batteries fail and leak all over the board around them, destroying traces and components. These aren't your typical lithium coin cell batteries that are very good at not leaking. When a leak happens, even if you can fix/replace the components mounted to the boards, when you've got multi-layer boards it gets hard to figure out how repair the damage that happened to the internal traces and such. If possible, replacing those batteries with something less likely to juice all over is what you want to do. And since you don't really know when it will start to leak, getting those old batteries out NOW is the safest option.
- chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
  My understanding is that it just needs to be replaced, it's a standard 1/2 length AA battery. People recommend to remove them altogether though, I guess they figure the machines will be sitting in a closet for another 15 years, best to remove the problem altogether.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    > People recommend to remove them altogether though, I guess they figure the machines will be sitting in a closet for another 15 years, best to remove the problem altogether. This is the reason. At the repair shop where I've worked we do recycling, and there's a lot of electronics that get destroyed by leaky batteries. If you can do it without voiding warranty (and sometimes even if you do void the warranty), always take the batteries out of electronics when they go into storage.
  - assttoasstmgr 5y ago
    It looks like this guy is actively using the machine so I couldn't understand why putting in a fresh battery and changing it regularly wouldn't be the preferred option and not dealing with a reset system clock every time you powered it off. As opposed to there was something on the logic board of the SE/30 that was harming the battery in some way and causing it to fail prematurely. This read more like "my gran says to always unplug the toaster else the house will surely burn down"
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
We had The Oregon Trail as part of teaching materials in our school in the 1980s. In the UK. Most of us in my class didn't know where Oregon is, really did not care about a story of woefully unprepared people who chose to make a journey for reasons of absolutely no consequence to a British nine year old, and to this day likely bear a grudge against an entire US state. I got into an awful lot of trouble for submitting the minimum possible homework on that. Other kids: fifteen pages of detailed drawings and stories. Me: two A5 sides of completely disinterested made-up diary. It was my only real rebellion.
- zabzonk 5y ago
  > We had The Oregon Trail as part of teaching materials in our school in the 1980s. > In the UK. You may be misrembering - a Mac would be very rare in a UK school - it was probably an Apple II.
  - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
    We had a room of BBC Micros, a room of RM Nimbuses, and a room of Macs at school (UK). The Macs were evidently the coolest. Pretty much the first thing I did when I got to university was buy a IIsi (funded by the articles I was writing for an 8-bit magazine).
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      The Nimbus was such a disappointing machine. At least the 380Z and 480Z looked like they came from a sci fi movie.
      - zabzonk 5y ago
        > At least the 380Z and 480Z looked like they came from a sci fi movie. Nah. they lookd like what they were, clunky bent-steel boxes. I agree the Nimbus was a dead-end.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
blable2 5y ago
Mine was 6K USD new in 1989 I think.
GeekyBear 5y ago
Find a copy of the game, Crystal Quest. I think it was the best of the early arcade style games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Quest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Quest
- RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
  Playable on an emulated Mac in your browser (along with loads of other demos), courtesy of the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/mac-demo-games https://archive.org/details/mac-demo-games
parenthesis 5y ago
There is just something perfect about the original Mac series. When Steve Jobs saw the Xerox Alto, he thought "well, obviously all personal computers are going to be like this", which is pretty much how I felt upon encountering the Mac for the first time (not until 1990). My opinions tend to be pretty weak these days (like a three-handed economist), but with a typical teenage passion, I could not understand why anyone would use Windows, or how Windows could even exist when the Mac was there. When I finally got my own (i)Mac in 2000, it was no longer quite so perfect. Although, I think the OS X 10.3 - 10.5 era got close.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  > I could not understand why anyone would use Windows, or how Windows could even exist when the Mac was there. Replace Windows with Mac and Mac with Amiga and you’re in my teenage passion years! Although I had the same feeling of “this is the future” when I saw a demonstration of the original Mac in 1984. But I just remember thinking, “no color?”
  - jandrese 5y ago
    Steve Jobs had a bug up his butt about machines that could play games being "toys for kids" and he did everything he could to have the Mac treated like a "serious business" machine, part of that included sticking with boring corporate monochrome graphics. I think he was mostly trying to avoid comparisons to the 8 bit Apples. The other reason being of course that VRAM was breathtakingly expensive at the time and you could save some money by going with 1 bit per pixel. All in all the Mac with its 512x342 monochrome display tended to come out looking nicer than the contemporary 320x200 16 color EGA graphics.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    I was never an Amiga guy. I remember seeing one at an acquaintances house and being bothered by the bad "iconography". In case I missed something, I recently checked out a few web pages that captured images of the original Amiga "desktop" and it confirmed to me that the UI truly was, IMHO, rather poor. That still is remarkable to me. Susan Kare deserves the accolades, but I'm surprised there no one on the Amiga team that could make as good a UI. For that matter, the Raspbian OS I've been playing with on the Raspberry Pi has some pretty ugly stuff. Just to use an obvious example, is Thonny's icon for real? I'll stop ranting about stuff I know nothing about now.
markus_zhang 5y ago
Does anyone know what kind of dev environment you can get on an SE? I guess assembly and Pascal are available.
- mwcremer 5y ago
  http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/development-tools http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/development-tools
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    thanks!
- RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
  Think C: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1417-symantec-think-c-5-0 https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1417-symantec-think-c-5-... QuickBASIC: https://winworldpc.com/product/quickbasic/10x-for-mac https://winworldpc.com/product/quickbasic/10x-for-mac Logo, Smalltalk, Forth, ABC, Lisp, and others: https://www.gryphel.com/c/sw/program/index.html https://www.gryphel.com/c/sw/program/index.html
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    interesting. a lot than I expected
- ksherlock 5y ago
  Apple's dev environment was MPW - Macintosh Programmer's Workshop - which provided a Unix-ish command-line environment within a text editor, if that makes sense. Ot included Asm, Pascal, C (later C++) and Rez compilers as well as common utilities. Some GNU utilities were also ported over.
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    Thanks. Does it have something similar to later Vim? I'll check it out.
sdoering 5y ago
The SE30 was the first real computer I was working on. The company my father worked for started to implement computers at the desks of most people. During the day they learned how to use them. In the late afternoon and evenings he did his regular work as a team lead. Me, being 14 was often at his work place (him being a single dad had me helping at the photocopy machine and stuff). And I was allowed to work/play on the computer. Shortly thereafter I got my own Macintosh Classic with 4mb RAM and 40 MB hard disk.
buserror 5y ago
Ah, I also bought a SE/30 recently, as part of a batch of an upgraded 128->plus, an original SE, and my prize: the SE/30. All working too. The reason I bought the SE/30 is because it's the computer I had on long term loan for my very first "paying" gig as developer, I was 17: making the software that drove the audio system for the Lille (FR) brand new metro lines back then. Wrote the software in Turbo Pascal, to run on a smaller mac -- it had a GPIO card that drove 2 big REVOX tape reels, and was rewinding them in sequence while the other played elevator music. It also had a selector and an 'alarm' button to trigger digital announces from the control room, in case of problems on the metro line. The audio played on 10th's of stations, for years. After a few mishaps (finding tapes torn to completely shreds in the computer room, because the 'beginning of tape' signal hadn't worked really well after rewinding!) it worked absolutely flawlessly until late 1999. I should have charged more :-) It also had an easter egg! It was playing an 'happy birthday' message to myself every year, in every stations, early day on my birthday. Nobody ever complained :-) I eventually returned the SE/30, and was given a PowerBook 140, which wasn't as fast, but hey, laptop baby, and, I still own that one!
ge96 5y ago
There was a video I saw a while back of one of these connecting to Google. It took a while but when it loaded it was surreal like wow, this old technology works today. Also if you like this stuff there's popular channels out there like Adrian's Digital basement or 8bit guy, etc... Side note: the movie Jobs (2013) was dramatized and all that but it had a cool scene, when those circuits drew something on a screen. I am aware of Xerox Alto and all that. But still the concept of making something so new... idk that's cool would like to be part of that. Also those chips seem more tangible than an i7 or something. You could almost mentally map which chip goes to what part of the screen. I will say I'm past it though, I don't really covet old tech just because of performance. I do to some degree like old Chromebooks using Linux.
zargon 5y ago
> Write Apple-Script to automate turning on 32-bit addressing automatically and setting the correct date every time I turn on the computer Rob Mitchelmore wrote the Force32 extension which is made for Macs without a PRAM battery. It makes sure 32-bit addressing is enabled during startup. (Note that since a restart is required after enabling 32-bit addressing, it will automatically restart during the first cold boot). https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/force32 https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/force32 https://github.com/cheesestraws/Force32 https://github.com/cheesestraws/Force32
- whatrocks 5y ago
  This is very helpful! I will try this first. Thanks.
kristopolous 5y ago
I had one with a 10baseT network card about 20 years ago. I ran NetBSD on it and punched a hole open so anyone could log in. I think I posted about it in the NetBSD IRC channel back in the EFNet days. You started up System 7 at first and then clicked on the launcher and it would reboot into NetBSD. This was like 1.something ... might have been 1.5? I had some external SCSI drives for it in the low GB range and I believe a CDRW. I think the ram was at 128MB (might have been 96) I had compiled Mozilla 0.9 or so for it (whatever was current) and it actually ran (compiling took I think 4 days because I compiled it on the SE/30). You could see the elements of the interface render to the screen in human time. I distinctly remember seeing each button come in to view and then slowly typed in "slashdot.org". I used it as an X terminal as well, using the -broadcast option to log into an HP-UX 10.20 machine. I ran sam and CDE on that tiny monochrome screen. So ridiculous. It was a glorious waste of time. Just looked in my old email archives --- this was indeed from 2002. Right, 20 years it is then.
- deltarholamda 5y ago
  Had one with the PDS Ethernet card as well. With Mode32 you could put in 128MB of RAM without swapping the ROM, or you could snitch a IIsi (IIRC) ROM and be 32-bit clean. I put NetBSD on mine as well, and used it as a mail server for a time. With a little jiggery-pokery of a Wifi AP you could even be wireless. Great machines.
- classichasclass 5y ago
  NetBSD/mac68k still boots that way. I have NetBSD on a IIci (128MB RAM, SCSI drive, Farallon Ethernet NuBus card). I use it for netatalk, and as an internal DNS, DHCP and printer server. Other than requiring a motherboard recap, it performs very well in this capacity. It's not fast, and I gimped it further by pulling the cache card (a source of instability), but it doesn't need to be.
rsync 5y ago
Just a note related to the SCSI2SD device mentioned in the article ... I recently bought four of these for use with various SGI and ran into a minor difficulty and the maker of these devices went well beyond the call of duty to assist me and provide suggestions, etc. On a Saturday.
erickhill 5y ago
In that post he links to "the 6th most 'notable' Mac ever" over on Six Colors where they created a Top 20 of all-time list. How that list failed to include the "Jurassic Park" computer, the gorgeous Quadra 700, truly made me sad. It's a machine where, if you need to take it apart, you can remove every single component - even the PSU and motherboard - with only ever needing to remove a single screw. (You can even remove the PSU's fan w/o needing any tools.) The rest is so beautifully designed that you can pop release all of it: floppy drive, hard drive PSU, speaker, motherboard, etc. The 1 single screw holds the drive caddy to the case. That's it. And it's a design strategy that I'm willing to bet at least 50% of Quadra 700 owners back in the day didn't even realize was sitting on their desks. By the way, the mini-desktop machine could be stood vertically or laid on its side - it was up to the user. Simply breathtakingly incredible design.
- runjake 5y ago
  Link: https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/08/20-macs-for-2020-an-introduction/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/08/20-macs-for-2020-an-intro...
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  Well, the list's author (Jason Snell, the former editor of Macworld) does write, "one of the most popular things about this series will be arguments about my terrible rankings and my unforgivable omissions." :)
  - erickhill 5y ago
    100% - I totally get it. Lists like these are always going to have What Ifs thrown in every direction. And the Q700 wasn't exactly popular by the mainstream (honestly, it was too expensive for that kind of awareness). And the list they created is fine even though the ordering could be batted around by plenty. I was just opining about an anecdotal personal fave. :)
- edbaskerville 5y ago
  The Quadra 700 case was basically a copy of the Mac IIcx and IIci, which are on there. My first Mac was a IIcx, and I still have it. It really does have a great case. (Sadly, it boots to error chimes.)
npunt 5y ago
SE/30's are the best. Here's a summary of some other modern and contemporaneous upgrades available: https://nickpunt.com/blog/se-30th-anniversary/ https://nickpunt.com/blog/se-30th-anniversary/
bobpappas 5y ago
MacGolf is a must have in this article. I'm so sad it wasn't included.
- zargon 5y ago
  My thought was Dark Castle is missing.
  - lolive 5y ago
    OF COURSE!!!
formvoltron 5y ago
This guy came from money. I had a Mac SE but couldn't afford that 30MB drive. I had two floppy disks instead.
coward123 5y ago
You know what I miss from that era? The extension that would allow Oscar the Grouch to pop out of the trash can. What I mean is - Macintosh really had this different vibe back then. You could easily customize everything about your experience in a way that was very exploratory. How many hours of my youth were wasted screwing around in RezEdit or in making cool icons? Yes, it's super cool there are things like Swift Playground these days - I'm glad we live in an era where I don't have to pirate Symantec Pascal like I did when I was 13 and wanted to learn how to code. But, I wish the overall user experience were more the fun and creative feel we once had rather than a very slick but overly corporate one.
- tambourine_man 5y ago
  Yeah, besides the fun of personalization and just pure joy of poking around, I worry that some true innovation might be stifled by all this protections. There should be several levels of security toggles, from being able to install software from anywhere on the internet, all the way to disabling memory protection altogether. As long as the user completely understands each, I think we would be in a much better situation.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    You mean like installing automatic updates ? Or running untrusted code in the browser ?
    - tambourine_man 5y ago
      I didn't understand your question
- amatecha 5y ago
  haha, didn't he sing a little song as well? one of my other favorites from those times was the Eyeballs INIT... useless but still completely awesome. A buddy of mine reimplemented it in JS so you can have Eyeballs on your website hahah http://jouire.com/eyeballs/ http://jouire.com/eyeballs/ Ah, I could go on and on about cool stuff like that. Indeed, ResEdit was super awesome, and I learned soo much about how computers work because of it (also having been a young kid who wanted to learn). Great memories :)
lolive 5y ago
I have spent most of my early computer years playing Sierra games and (Beyond) Dark Castle on a Mac SE. Still a marvellous memory! [my father brought one day a CD300. It was supposed to be a revolution. Well ok, I used it to listen to Pink Floyd CDs while playing King Quest ;)]
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Surprising how expensive these were. Apparently the original price for this was around $4k - maybe $9k modern eqv. 128MB of RAM would have been insanely spendy in 1989. Somewhere around $30k modern eqv. So the total equivalent cost would be as much as a higher spec Mac Pro.
- tambourine_man 5y ago
  >128MB of RAM would have been insanely spendy in 1989 I’m pretty sure those were unavailable at that time for any amount of money.
  - kalleboo 5y ago
    In 1989, supercomputers came with 512 - 2048 MB of RAM
    - tambourine_man 5y ago
      I meant RAM sticks that would fit on a SE
- amatecha 5y ago
  When the SE/30 came out it could only address up to 8mb of RAM anyways due to the 24-bit ROM. I think you could either swap the ROM from IIfx or IIsi (which came out the next year), or use the MODE32 INIT[0] which I believe required System 7 and came out in 1991, two years after the release of the SE/30. I guess 128mb of RAM would have been a bit cheaper by then... hopefully haha [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODE32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODE32
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Mine was maxed out with 8x 1M simms. Didn't hear about a 32 M mod until just recently.
Bradlinc 5y ago
I read every article about classic Macs. Like many of us, these computers are where I got started with my tech love. That said the only thing I really miss is Flying Toasters. Okay, maybe a spacial Finder as well.
paulpauper 5y ago
don't hard drives die after so many years?
- krallja 5y ago
  The article talks about the SCSI2SD, which emulates a hard drive with a modern SD card.
rcarmo 5y ago
I love these machines, I restored one some 20 years ago (put it together from parts of two others), and gave it away to a friend. I hope she kept it.
hestefisk 5y ago
I really want one of these. Any sellers in Singapore?
amatecha 5y ago
Niice, this is great. I really need to recap and otherwise tidy up my SE/30. Just dreading opening it up and finding a bunch of leaked capacitor fluid... Guess I better get on that!! Uh and the Mac Plus, too... >_> The one downside of having lots of old computers is you have to take care of them too!
eek2121 5y ago
As someone who owned an SE/30, I had an emotional roller coaster. Like, really?!?!?! You dare use a custom firmware?!??! Oh, but...YES! The memories! chef's kiss
rbanffy 5y ago
As a tip, which I learned the very hard way, I now keep the machines upside down (or, in some cases, on their sides) in a way the exploding components face the ground so that, if they decide to destroy the computer, gravity will prevent the fluids from digesting the board.
ubermonkey 5y ago
That was the first Mac I really, really wanted. Beefy (for the era) processor, still the great form factor. Sadly, I didn't actually get a Mac for another 10 years, but the SE/30 lives on in my head. Had I extravagant amounts of free space in my office, I'd track one down to run as a hobby.

106 points by whatrocks 5y ago

score! Honestly I like BBEdit to this day for text, and the vector drawing programs. No mention of postscript printing, but that works well (pre-Level III postscript). Very fast interface for most things, even faster than many desktop computers today for native Mac software. I definitely kept my OS install disks and amenities, but it is somewhat humbling to read about entire ROMs and SCSI hacks here.. not easy! very nice to see it on YNews.

mrkstu 5y ago
Mac/Claris Draw is still more usable than anything comparable today and therefore the effective power is almost as much for non-pro users.

Bud 5y ago

I still have my old SE/30. It's still working. Has the Ethernet card installed, so it's even marginally useful. I also picked up my old 512k "Fat" Mac from my aunt's house where I had it stored for 20 years. Powered it up. Bright white screen, perfectly sharp, works perfectly. Not bad for a machine that debuted in 1984.

wwweston 5y ago
Would you say it's worth getting an ethernet card and fixing one with screen (likely leaky cap) issues? I've got one that I've wondered might be a good connected-but-not-TOO-connected device.
- Bud 5y ago
  If you're a real Mac lover? Definitely. I used to use mine all the time as a very fancy vt100 terminal for an old Apollo server I had, and also to telnet to a BBS I was running in the late 90s. It's a great conversation piece, too.
- floren 5y ago
  If you haven't already, you should open it up and remove the PRAM battery. I've seen what happens when the battery bursts and then sits for a few years... not pretty. The caps aren't as big of a deal in comparison, they just need to be replaced when you want to use it.
  - zargon 5y ago
    The caps are a big deal, just not as bad as the battery. The caps leak corrosive electrolytic fluid which eats traces and corrodes component legs. Most un-restored SE/30s require trace repairs at this point due to leaky caps. The longer the original caps remain the more extensive the repairs.
- twmiller 5y ago
  Also own a Mac SE/30 and pretty much went through the hoops that the linked article did, only I did all of it myself. I also picked up an ethernet card for it because I had a retro-computer connection who got me one for a really good price (like, an AMAZINGLY good price). Otherwise, the network adapters for the SE/30's PDS slot are pretty rare and usually very expensive. A far less expensive option is to get a Pi Zero, a USB-to-serial adapter, and a Apple-to-9-pin null modem cable. You can set up SLIRP on the pi running linux and then use a PPP modem driver to connect to the internet on the se/30. You're stuck at serial port speeds, but honestly for most of what you want to do on a computer this old (irc, bbsing, file transfers of se/30 sized files) it's actually pretty solid. I use the pi zero / serial interface for a bunch of my old computers that don't have proper network adapters.
chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
Which ethernet card do you have? I have a saved ebay search but nothing has popped up recently
- ncmncm 5y ago
  You could emulate one with an ESP32 or something and have wifi. The bus is only 16 MHz, slow enough for a modern microcontroller to bit-bang.

gnu8 5y ago

Besides all of the software listed, that machine would also be a prime A/UX rig with that amount of RAM installed

whatrocks 5y ago
I'm going to add this to my to-do list.
- gnu8 5y ago
  I look forward to reading about your experience with it!
ncmncm 5y ago
Hear, hear! A/UX was a great OS, with an OS9 GUI on/with X11. Worked fine in 8MB. (Note: not GB, MB!) I still have my SE/30. Need to replace some caps and boot it...
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Was OS 7.

assttoasstmgr 5y ago

Can someone explain why removal (as opposed to replacement) of the PRAM battery is necessary? How is this different from any other CMOS motherboard battery? Is there a fault in the circuitry that causes the battery to fail catastrophically?

torgoguys 5y ago
Those batteries fail and leak all over the board around them, destroying traces and components. These aren't your typical lithium coin cell batteries that are very good at not leaking. When a leak happens, even if you can fix/replace the components mounted to the boards, when you've got multi-layer boards it gets hard to figure out how repair the damage that happened to the internal traces and such. If possible, replacing those batteries with something less likely to juice all over is what you want to do. And since you don't really know when it will start to leak, getting those old batteries out NOW is the safest option.
chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
My understanding is that it just needs to be replaced, it's a standard 1/2 length AA battery. People recommend to remove them altogether though, I guess they figure the machines will be sitting in a closet for another 15 years, best to remove the problem altogether.
- Shared404 5y ago
  > People recommend to remove them altogether though, I guess they figure the machines will be sitting in a closet for another 15 years, best to remove the problem altogether. This is the reason. At the repair shop where I've worked we do recycling, and there's a lot of electronics that get destroyed by leaky batteries. If you can do it without voiding warranty (and sometimes even if you do void the warranty), always take the batteries out of electronics when they go into storage.
- assttoasstmgr 5y ago
  It looks like this guy is actively using the machine so I couldn't understand why putting in a fresh battery and changing it regularly wouldn't be the preferred option and not dealing with a reset system clock every time you powered it off. As opposed to there was something on the logic board of the SE/30 that was harming the battery in some way and causing it to fail prematurely. This read more like "my gran says to always unplug the toaster else the house will surely burn down"

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

We had The Oregon Trail as part of teaching materials in our school in the 1980s. In the UK. Most of us in my class didn't know where Oregon is, really did not care about a story of woefully unprepared people who chose to make a journey for reasons of absolutely no consequence to a British nine year old, and to this day likely bear a grudge against an entire US state. I got into an awful lot of trouble for submitting the minimum possible homework on that. Other kids: fifteen pages of detailed drawings and stories. Me: two A5 sides of completely disinterested made-up diary. It was my only real rebellion.

zabzonk 5y ago
> We had The Oregon Trail as part of teaching materials in our school in the 1980s. > In the UK. You may be misrembering - a Mac would be very rare in a UK school - it was probably an Apple II.
- Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
  We had a room of BBC Micros, a room of RM Nimbuses, and a room of Macs at school (UK). The Macs were evidently the coolest. Pretty much the first thing I did when I got to university was buy a IIsi (funded by the articles I was writing for an 8-bit magazine).
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    The Nimbus was such a disappointing machine. At least the 380Z and 480Z looked like they came from a sci fi movie.
    - zabzonk 5y ago
      > At least the 380Z and 480Z looked like they came from a sci fi movie. Nah. they lookd like what they were, clunky bent-steel boxes. I agree the Nimbus was a dead-end.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago

blable2 5y ago

Mine was 6K USD new in 1989 I think.

GeekyBear 5y ago

Find a copy of the game, Crystal Quest. I think it was the best of the early arcade style games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Quest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Quest

RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
Playable on an emulated Mac in your browser (along with loads of other demos), courtesy of the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/mac-demo-games https://archive.org/details/mac-demo-games

parenthesis 5y ago

There is just something perfect about the original Mac series. When Steve Jobs saw the Xerox Alto, he thought "well, obviously all personal computers are going to be like this", which is pretty much how I felt upon encountering the Mac for the first time (not until 1990). My opinions tend to be pretty weak these days (like a three-handed economist), but with a typical teenage passion, I could not understand why anyone would use Windows, or how Windows could even exist when the Mac was there. When I finally got my own (i)Mac in 2000, it was no longer quite so perfect. Although, I think the OS X 10.3 - 10.5 era got close.

technothrasher 5y ago
> I could not understand why anyone would use Windows, or how Windows could even exist when the Mac was there. Replace Windows with Mac and Mac with Amiga and you’re in my teenage passion years! Although I had the same feeling of “this is the future” when I saw a demonstration of the original Mac in 1984. But I just remember thinking, “no color?”
- jandrese 5y ago
  Steve Jobs had a bug up his butt about machines that could play games being "toys for kids" and he did everything he could to have the Mac treated like a "serious business" machine, part of that included sticking with boring corporate monochrome graphics. I think he was mostly trying to avoid comparisons to the 8 bit Apples. The other reason being of course that VRAM was breathtakingly expensive at the time and you could save some money by going with 1 bit per pixel. All in all the Mac with its 512x342 monochrome display tended to come out looking nicer than the contemporary 320x200 16 color EGA graphics.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I was never an Amiga guy. I remember seeing one at an acquaintances house and being bothered by the bad "iconography". In case I missed something, I recently checked out a few web pages that captured images of the original Amiga "desktop" and it confirmed to me that the UI truly was, IMHO, rather poor. That still is remarkable to me. Susan Kare deserves the accolades, but I'm surprised there no one on the Amiga team that could make as good a UI. For that matter, the Raspbian OS I've been playing with on the Raspberry Pi has some pretty ugly stuff. Just to use an obvious example, is Thonny's icon for real? I'll stop ranting about stuff I know nothing about now.

markus_zhang 5y ago

Does anyone know what kind of dev environment you can get on an SE? I guess assembly and Pascal are available.

mwcremer 5y ago
http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/development-tools http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/development-tools
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  thanks!
RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
Think C: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1417-symantec-think-c-5-0 https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1417-symantec-think-c-5-... QuickBASIC: https://winworldpc.com/product/quickbasic/10x-for-mac https://winworldpc.com/product/quickbasic/10x-for-mac Logo, Smalltalk, Forth, ABC, Lisp, and others: https://www.gryphel.com/c/sw/program/index.html https://www.gryphel.com/c/sw/program/index.html
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  interesting. a lot than I expected
ksherlock 5y ago
Apple's dev environment was MPW - Macintosh Programmer's Workshop - which provided a Unix-ish command-line environment within a text editor, if that makes sense. Ot included Asm, Pascal, C (later C++) and Rez compilers as well as common utilities. Some GNU utilities were also ported over.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  Thanks. Does it have something similar to later Vim? I'll check it out.

sdoering 5y ago

The SE30 was the first real computer I was working on. The company my father worked for started to implement computers at the desks of most people. During the day they learned how to use them. In the late afternoon and evenings he did his regular work as a team lead. Me, being 14 was often at his work place (him being a single dad had me helping at the photocopy machine and stuff). And I was allowed to work/play on the computer. Shortly thereafter I got my own Macintosh Classic with 4mb RAM and 40 MB hard disk.

buserror 5y ago

Ah, I also bought a SE/30 recently, as part of a batch of an upgraded 128->plus, an original SE, and my prize: the SE/30. All working too. The reason I bought the SE/30 is because it's the computer I had on long term loan for my very first "paying" gig as developer, I was 17: making the software that drove the audio system for the Lille (FR) brand new metro lines back then. Wrote the software in Turbo Pascal, to run on a smaller mac -- it had a GPIO card that drove 2 big REVOX tape reels, and was rewinding them in sequence while the other played elevator music. It also had a selector and an 'alarm' button to trigger digital announces from the control room, in case of problems on the metro line. The audio played on 10th's of stations, for years. After a few mishaps (finding tapes torn to completely shreds in the computer room, because the 'beginning of tape' signal hadn't worked really well after rewinding!) it worked absolutely flawlessly until late 1999. I should have charged more :-) It also had an easter egg! It was playing an 'happy birthday' message to myself every year, in every stations, early day on my birthday. Nobody ever complained :-) I eventually returned the SE/30, and was given a PowerBook 140, which wasn't as fast, but hey, laptop baby, and, I still own that one!

ge96 5y ago

There was a video I saw a while back of one of these connecting to Google. It took a while but when it loaded it was surreal like wow, this old technology works today. Also if you like this stuff there's popular channels out there like Adrian's Digital basement or 8bit guy, etc... Side note: the movie Jobs (2013) was dramatized and all that but it had a cool scene, when those circuits drew something on a screen. I am aware of Xerox Alto and all that. But still the concept of making something so new... idk that's cool would like to be part of that. Also those chips seem more tangible than an i7 or something. You could almost mentally map which chip goes to what part of the screen. I will say I'm past it though, I don't really covet old tech just because of performance. I do to some degree like old Chromebooks using Linux.

zargon 5y ago

> Write Apple-Script to automate turning on 32-bit addressing automatically and setting the correct date every time I turn on the computer Rob Mitchelmore wrote the Force32 extension which is made for Macs without a PRAM battery. It makes sure 32-bit addressing is enabled during startup. (Note that since a restart is required after enabling 32-bit addressing, it will automatically restart during the first cold boot). https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/force32 https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/force32 https://github.com/cheesestraws/Force32 https://github.com/cheesestraws/Force32

whatrocks 5y ago
This is very helpful! I will try this first. Thanks.

kristopolous 5y ago

I had one with a 10baseT network card about 20 years ago. I ran NetBSD on it and punched a hole open so anyone could log in. I think I posted about it in the NetBSD IRC channel back in the EFNet days. You started up System 7 at first and then clicked on the launcher and it would reboot into NetBSD. This was like 1.something ... might have been 1.5? I had some external SCSI drives for it in the low GB range and I believe a CDRW. I think the ram was at 128MB (might have been 96) I had compiled Mozilla 0.9 or so for it (whatever was current) and it actually ran (compiling took I think 4 days because I compiled it on the SE/30). You could see the elements of the interface render to the screen in human time. I distinctly remember seeing each button come in to view and then slowly typed in "slashdot.org". I used it as an X terminal as well, using the -broadcast option to log into an HP-UX 10.20 machine. I ran sam and CDE on that tiny monochrome screen. So ridiculous. It was a glorious waste of time. Just looked in my old email archives --- this was indeed from 2002. Right, 20 years it is then.

deltarholamda 5y ago
Had one with the PDS Ethernet card as well. With Mode32 you could put in 128MB of RAM without swapping the ROM, or you could snitch a IIsi (IIRC) ROM and be 32-bit clean. I put NetBSD on mine as well, and used it as a mail server for a time. With a little jiggery-pokery of a Wifi AP you could even be wireless. Great machines.
classichasclass 5y ago
NetBSD/mac68k still boots that way. I have NetBSD on a IIci (128MB RAM, SCSI drive, Farallon Ethernet NuBus card). I use it for netatalk, and as an internal DNS, DHCP and printer server. Other than requiring a motherboard recap, it performs very well in this capacity. It's not fast, and I gimped it further by pulling the cache card (a source of instability), but it doesn't need to be.

rsync 5y ago

Just a note related to the SCSI2SD device mentioned in the article ... I recently bought four of these for use with various SGI and ran into a minor difficulty and the maker of these devices went well beyond the call of duty to assist me and provide suggestions, etc. On a Saturday.

erickhill 5y ago

In that post he links to "the 6th most 'notable' Mac ever" over on Six Colors where they created a Top 20 of all-time list. How that list failed to include the "Jurassic Park" computer, the gorgeous Quadra 700, truly made me sad. It's a machine where, if you need to take it apart, you can remove every single component - even the PSU and motherboard - with only ever needing to remove a single screw. (You can even remove the PSU's fan w/o needing any tools.) The rest is so beautifully designed that you can pop release all of it: floppy drive, hard drive PSU, speaker, motherboard, etc. The 1 single screw holds the drive caddy to the case. That's it. And it's a design strategy that I'm willing to bet at least 50% of Quadra 700 owners back in the day didn't even realize was sitting on their desks. By the way, the mini-desktop machine could be stood vertically or laid on its side - it was up to the user. Simply breathtakingly incredible design.

runjake 5y ago
Link: https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/08/20-macs-for-2020-an-introduction/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/08/20-macs-for-2020-an-intro...
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
Well, the list's author (Jason Snell, the former editor of Macworld) does write, "one of the most popular things about this series will be arguments about my terrible rankings and my unforgivable omissions." :)
- erickhill 5y ago
  100% - I totally get it. Lists like these are always going to have What Ifs thrown in every direction. And the Q700 wasn't exactly popular by the mainstream (honestly, it was too expensive for that kind of awareness). And the list they created is fine even though the ordering could be batted around by plenty. I was just opining about an anecdotal personal fave. :)
edbaskerville 5y ago
The Quadra 700 case was basically a copy of the Mac IIcx and IIci, which are on there. My first Mac was a IIcx, and I still have it. It really does have a great case. (Sadly, it boots to error chimes.)

npunt 5y ago

SE/30's are the best. Here's a summary of some other modern and contemporaneous upgrades available: https://nickpunt.com/blog/se-30th-anniversary/ https://nickpunt.com/blog/se-30th-anniversary/

bobpappas 5y ago

MacGolf is a must have in this article. I'm so sad it wasn't included.

zargon 5y ago
My thought was Dark Castle is missing.
- lolive 5y ago
  OF COURSE!!!

formvoltron 5y ago

This guy came from money. I had a Mac SE but couldn't afford that 30MB drive. I had two floppy disks instead.

coward123 5y ago

You know what I miss from that era? The extension that would allow Oscar the Grouch to pop out of the trash can. What I mean is - Macintosh really had this different vibe back then. You could easily customize everything about your experience in a way that was very exploratory. How many hours of my youth were wasted screwing around in RezEdit or in making cool icons? Yes, it's super cool there are things like Swift Playground these days - I'm glad we live in an era where I don't have to pirate Symantec Pascal like I did when I was 13 and wanted to learn how to code. But, I wish the overall user experience were more the fun and creative feel we once had rather than a very slick but overly corporate one.

tambourine_man 5y ago
Yeah, besides the fun of personalization and just pure joy of poking around, I worry that some true innovation might be stifled by all this protections. There should be several levels of security toggles, from being able to install software from anywhere on the internet, all the way to disabling memory protection altogether. As long as the user completely understands each, I think we would be in a much better situation.
- hulitu 5y ago
  You mean like installing automatic updates ? Or running untrusted code in the browser ?
  - tambourine_man 5y ago
    I didn't understand your question
amatecha 5y ago
haha, didn't he sing a little song as well? one of my other favorites from those times was the Eyeballs INIT... useless but still completely awesome. A buddy of mine reimplemented it in JS so you can have Eyeballs on your website hahah http://jouire.com/eyeballs/ http://jouire.com/eyeballs/ Ah, I could go on and on about cool stuff like that. Indeed, ResEdit was super awesome, and I learned soo much about how computers work because of it (also having been a young kid who wanted to learn). Great memories :)

lolive 5y ago

I have spent most of my early computer years playing Sierra games and (Beyond) Dark Castle on a Mac SE. Still a marvellous memory! [my father brought one day a CD300. It was supposed to be a revolution. Well ok, I used it to listen to Pink Floyd CDs while playing King Quest ;)]

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

Surprising how expensive these were. Apparently the original price for this was around $4k - maybe $9k modern eqv. 128MB of RAM would have been insanely spendy in 1989. Somewhere around $30k modern eqv. So the total equivalent cost would be as much as a higher spec Mac Pro.

tambourine_man 5y ago
>128MB of RAM would have been insanely spendy in 1989 I’m pretty sure those were unavailable at that time for any amount of money.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  In 1989, supercomputers came with 512 - 2048 MB of RAM
  - tambourine_man 5y ago
    I meant RAM sticks that would fit on a SE
amatecha 5y ago
When the SE/30 came out it could only address up to 8mb of RAM anyways due to the 24-bit ROM. I think you could either swap the ROM from IIfx or IIsi (which came out the next year), or use the MODE32 INIT[0] which I believe required System 7 and came out in 1991, two years after the release of the SE/30. I guess 128mb of RAM would have been a bit cheaper by then... hopefully haha [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODE32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODE32
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Mine was maxed out with 8x 1M simms. Didn't hear about a 32 M mod until just recently.

Bradlinc 5y ago

I read every article about classic Macs. Like many of us, these computers are where I got started with my tech love. That said the only thing I really miss is Flying Toasters. Okay, maybe a spacial Finder as well.

paulpauper 5y ago

don't hard drives die after so many years?

krallja 5y ago
The article talks about the SCSI2SD, which emulates a hard drive with a modern SD card.

rcarmo 5y ago

I love these machines, I restored one some 20 years ago (put it together from parts of two others), and gave it away to a friend. I hope she kept it.

hestefisk 5y ago

I really want one of these. Any sellers in Singapore?

amatecha 5y ago

Niice, this is great. I really need to recap and otherwise tidy up my SE/30. Just dreading opening it up and finding a bunch of leaked capacitor fluid... Guess I better get on that!! Uh and the Mac Plus, too... >_> The one downside of having lots of old computers is you have to take care of them too!

eek2121 5y ago

As someone who owned an SE/30, I had an emotional roller coaster. Like, really?!?!?! You dare use a custom firmware?!??! Oh, but...YES! The memories! chef's kiss

rbanffy 5y ago

As a tip, which I learned the very hard way, I now keep the machines upside down (or, in some cases, on their sides) in a way the exploding components face the ground so that, if they decide to destroy the computer, gravity will prevent the fluids from digesting the board.

ubermonkey 5y ago

That was the first Mac I really, really wanted. Beefy (for the era) processor, still the great form factor. Sadly, I didn't actually get a Mac for another 10 years, but the SE/30 lives on in my head. Had I extravagant amounts of free space in my office, I'd track one down to run as a hobby.