5 ms·

Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30

107 points by zdw 4y ago

jacquesm 4y ago
That's the electronics equivalent of sticking a jet engine in a Cessna, very nice! I really love this kind of hack, instead of ending up in the landfill someone has a ton of fun, learns a lot and breathes new life into a bunch of old hardware. Obviously it's not going to be able to hold its own against modern hardware but who cares, as long as itches get scratched it's all in the game. If you look at crate upon crate of mobile phones trashed as e-waste and you realize that each and every one of them is probably the equivalent of a 1980's super computer and still working from an electronics point of view then the 'planned obsolescence' path that we are on is ultimately doomed to fail. Sooner or later really building for re-use will have to become the norm.
- hulitu 4y ago
  The only, big problem, is that reuse does not increase profits. The problem is made worse by the fact that those phones cannot easily be converted to run something else.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    For a long time I've figured that profits to a company should be seen relative to cost to society, not just cost to the company. This is seriously broken and the driver behind most externalization effects.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pvg 4y ago
  the electronics equivalent of sticking a jet engine in a Cessna Not to take anything away from this cool thing but both of these cards were designed/made for the SE/30 as was the passthrough capability. It's a little closer to what Melba Toast is packin' right here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUZi-Ftcs9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUZi-Ftcs9Y
- pbnjeh 4y ago
  Not a Cessna, but... https://www.ronpatrickstuff.com/ https://www.ronpatrickstuff.com/ (Actually, I suspect you've probably seen this -- a while back. But, like me, it may be a pleasant little memory, along with the one of that fellow with one in his shed for cooling beers.)
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Yes, I have, that guy is amazing, the engineering and machining abilities are pretty awesome. I wished I had 10% of that talent.
- SomeHacker44 4y ago
  Cessna did this half a century ago themselves and called it a Citation. :)
smackeyacky 4y ago
You have to applaud this guy, getting an ethernet card and a video card in an SE/30 would have been impressive way back in the 1980s, let alone now. From memory at the university, we had Fastpath boxes (maybe before they were bought by Shiva). At one point about a decade ago I got nostalgic for classic macs and hooked 512 up in my garage with a Fastpath. Took me a while to get enough working localtalk adaptors and whatnot to set it up, and another while to track down the right networking software to get it working. Turned it on, configured, whoah I have an IP address in MacTCP. Got it file sharing off the house Linux server. Fired up macwww and pointed it at google and about 15 minutes later, after heroically trying to render the page I got a few characters and nothing recognisable. An SE/30 is miles faster than a 512 so you might be able to do something useful with it, but macwww didn't render graphics and chokes on anything that isn't plain html. I think it would be even worse now, you would need a HTTPS/HTTP proxy to get anything at all. Nostalgic computing is awfully fun but all the fun is in the setup, finding parts, working on solutions etc. The end product is generally underwhelming but the journey is the real reward.
- anthk 4y ago
  Or just a gopher client against gopher://hngopher.com :D. gopher://magical.fish has lots of sites.
- retrac 4y ago
  A clever hacker has gone and ported a modern SSL library to System 7, plus SSH [1]. Runs on a 68030+ Mac. OpenTransport, not MacTCP. And I imagine key exchange takes a few minutes... but yeah, you can ssh into a contemporary machine over the open Internet using a Mac SE/30 under System 7. (You could also just run NetBSD on the thing and run an entirely modern stack, in theory. The SE/30 can take 128 MB of RAM. It's one of the oldest machines out there that can run a current operating system! Though I'm unsure whether Firefox would finish loading before the heat death of the universe.) [1] https://github.com/cy384/ssheven https://github.com/cy384/ssheven
  - OnlyMortal 4y ago
    I recall GUSI on the Mac. A socket style interface that sat on top of OT and MacTCP, depending what was available. Made life easier.
moloch-hai 4y ago
Need to get A/UX running on it now. I only found out decades later that I could, eventually, have crammed 32MB into the 8 slots of my SE/30 I bought "maxed out" at 8M.
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  One of my hallmates in college ran A/UX on her SE/30. It was rad.
- helf 4y ago
  What’s really fun is you can upgrade the SE/30 to 128Mb
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Wow, really? Are there 16MB SIMMs that fit? I seem to recall I had thought the MacOS GUI subsystem limited it to 16MB, anyway, by packing data into the high byte of addresses... Maybe a later release fixed that?
    - helf 4y ago
      I believe it requires a 32bit clean ROM, but, yeah, you can. Lemme dig up some links. edit https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/sonmyl/se30_mods_custom_rom_128mb_ram_battery_replacement/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/sonmyl/se30_m... https://charlieharrington.com/my-new-old-apple-macintosh-se30-computer/ https://charlieharrington.com/my-new-old-apple-macintosh-se3... https://lowendmac.com/2016/memory-upgrades-mac-se30/ https://lowendmac.com/2016/memory-upgrades-mac-se30/
mgiampapa 4y ago
While impressive, it would have been a lot easier to just use a SCSI connected Ethernet adapter. Correct SCSI termination would have required sacrificing a chicken and drawing a pentagram in blood, but still easier than this project.
- greenbit 4y ago
  Yeah, but when you get that termination working, you get to turn to the 4th wall and shout, "It's alive! Alive! Oh, now I know what it feels like to be Woz!"
- scarface74 4y ago
  I never had those issues with SCSI. By 1996 I had a Zip drive, a Jaz drive, an external CDROM drive and two external hard drives connected to my PPC 6100 without issues.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Pure luck. Seriously. I wished I could get back all the hours I spent tracking down termination issues. And don't get me started on 10base-T.
    - macintux 4y ago
      10base-T or 2? I had ongoing nightmares with the latter, BBN R&D used it extensively and we’d have entire network segments flood with noise when someone bumped an AppleTalk repeater in the data closet.
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        Well, to be fair I was thinking of repeaters and hubs before switched became the norm, but now that you mention it, I do have a couple of horror stories regarding 10base2 as well. In particular, to stay 'on topic' regarding termination, or lack thereof. And those neat insulation piercing taps :(
- 4y ago
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
Sometimes I think that if it weren't for heavy cryptography and graphical interfaces, I could do so many things online even with a computer as old as this one. I could browse a textual version of HN, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram and even post and comment things! Sending HTTP packets to an open API has been a kids game for decades, unfortunately companies just don't want you to hack together your own solution
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  I've been reading Gopher under MacOS 8.1 (emulated) over the holidays, and it's been nice. Light WWW sites work in Netscape 3 on it, but you have to offload https to a proxy because it's not compatible with modern TLS.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Whatever you end up using for a proxy likely has 10x the horsepower of this Mac though.
  - anthk 4y ago
    - gopher://hngopher.com , gopher://magical.fish , http://68k.news http://68k.news and , as a sinkhole, gopher://gopherddit.com
  - samtheprogram 4y ago
    What are you using for the proxy? I am interested in breathing life into a OS 9 eMac I have.
- pcurve 4y ago
  I used these old machines. You'd be surprised how slow these machines are even for the most basic things! Like typing, opening folders, etc. :)
flenserboy 4y ago
Action Retro on YouTube has also been squeezing a host of things into SE/30s — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtYutLwYYXo&t=974s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtYutLwYYXo&t=974s
deltarholamda 4y ago
The SE/30 was one of the all-time great computers. The form factor was very intimate, and even portable-ish if you needed it to be. With Mode32 you could install 128MB of RAM. This was an insane amount of memory back in the day. With full RAM and the SCSI port, they made pretty good file servers once you stuck an ethernet card in the PDS slot. I had one that I used for programming back in the 90s. I used BBEdit (v4 I think), which was (and still is) a great text editor. Later, I installed NetBSD on it and used it as a local mail server. It was by far my favorite computer. I don't understand why someone isn't making a more modern computer in this form factor. Okay, you're not going to want to watch a movie on a 10-12 inch screen, but for a dedicated "I'm going to do computer things now" computer, it's very inviting.
- solardev 4y ago
  Well, your average Chromebook has a similar screen, more power, built-in battery, and can run Linux. And Ye olde Beaglebone or Android computer on an HDMI stick is more portable and more powerful. And if you want a new Mac, well, the Mini is an amazing machine in a tiny package, or there's also the Intel NUCs. Or for gaming, the Shuttle PCs, Razer Tomahawk, etc. Or just connect your iPad to a keyboard. Don't get me wrong, I loved those old Macs too, having learned Logo and Hypercard on them. But most of that machine was the CRT monitor plus huge components. You can pack a lot more into a lot less these days. I do miss the "cute" factor though. They were loveable in a way that modern machines just aren't.
  - deltarholamda 4y ago
    > You can pack a lot more into a lot less these days. True, but even so, there is no reason to not have a little tower with a friendly face sitting on a desk, even if it's mostly empty space. Or use the empty space for something, like a door to a cubby where you can store a game pad. If you need mobility a laptop is great. But sitting hunched over at a desk using a laptop is not nearly as good as sitting upright with the screen at a more ergonomic height. Maybe it's all just nostalgia, but I think we got a lot of things right back in the day, and the toaster Mac was definitely one of those things.
- 4y ago
jimmyreilly 4y ago
Oh man, the SE 30 was my first machine as a kid. I still remember putting hours into shuffle puck cafe.

107 points by zdw 4y ago

That's the electronics equivalent of sticking a jet engine in a Cessna, very nice! I really love this kind of hack, instead of ending up in the landfill someone has a ton of fun, learns a lot and breathes new life into a bunch of old hardware. Obviously it's not going to be able to hold its own against modern hardware but who cares, as long as itches get scratched it's all in the game. If you look at crate upon crate of mobile phones trashed as e-waste and you realize that each and every one of them is probably the equivalent of a 1980's super computer and still working from an electronics point of view then the 'planned obsolescence' path that we are on is ultimately doomed to fail. Sooner or later really building for re-use will have to become the norm.

hulitu 4y ago
The only, big problem, is that reuse does not increase profits. The problem is made worse by the fact that those phones cannot easily be converted to run something else.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  For a long time I've figured that profits to a company should be seen relative to cost to society, not just cost to the company. This is seriously broken and the driver behind most externalization effects.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pvg 4y ago
the electronics equivalent of sticking a jet engine in a Cessna Not to take anything away from this cool thing but both of these cards were designed/made for the SE/30 as was the passthrough capability. It's a little closer to what Melba Toast is packin' right here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUZi-Ftcs9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUZi-Ftcs9Y
pbnjeh 4y ago
Not a Cessna, but... https://www.ronpatrickstuff.com/ https://www.ronpatrickstuff.com/ (Actually, I suspect you've probably seen this -- a while back. But, like me, it may be a pleasant little memory, along with the one of that fellow with one in his shed for cooling beers.)
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Yes, I have, that guy is amazing, the engineering and machining abilities are pretty awesome. I wished I had 10% of that talent.
SomeHacker44 4y ago
Cessna did this half a century ago themselves and called it a Citation. :)

smackeyacky 4y ago

You have to applaud this guy, getting an ethernet card and a video card in an SE/30 would have been impressive way back in the 1980s, let alone now. From memory at the university, we had Fastpath boxes (maybe before they were bought by Shiva). At one point about a decade ago I got nostalgic for classic macs and hooked 512 up in my garage with a Fastpath. Took me a while to get enough working localtalk adaptors and whatnot to set it up, and another while to track down the right networking software to get it working. Turned it on, configured, whoah I have an IP address in MacTCP. Got it file sharing off the house Linux server. Fired up macwww and pointed it at google and about 15 minutes later, after heroically trying to render the page I got a few characters and nothing recognisable. An SE/30 is miles faster than a 512 so you might be able to do something useful with it, but macwww didn't render graphics and chokes on anything that isn't plain html. I think it would be even worse now, you would need a HTTPS/HTTP proxy to get anything at all. Nostalgic computing is awfully fun but all the fun is in the setup, finding parts, working on solutions etc. The end product is generally underwhelming but the journey is the real reward.

anthk 4y ago
Or just a gopher client against gopher://hngopher.com :D. gopher://magical.fish has lots of sites.
retrac 4y ago
A clever hacker has gone and ported a modern SSL library to System 7, plus SSH [1]. Runs on a 68030+ Mac. OpenTransport, not MacTCP. And I imagine key exchange takes a few minutes... but yeah, you can ssh into a contemporary machine over the open Internet using a Mac SE/30 under System 7. (You could also just run NetBSD on the thing and run an entirely modern stack, in theory. The SE/30 can take 128 MB of RAM. It's one of the oldest machines out there that can run a current operating system! Though I'm unsure whether Firefox would finish loading before the heat death of the universe.) [1] https://github.com/cy384/ssheven https://github.com/cy384/ssheven
- OnlyMortal 4y ago
  I recall GUSI on the Mac. A socket style interface that sat on top of OT and MacTCP, depending what was available. Made life easier.

moloch-hai 4y ago

Need to get A/UX running on it now. I only found out decades later that I could, eventually, have crammed 32MB into the 8 slots of my SE/30 I bought "maxed out" at 8M.

NoGravitas 4y ago
One of my hallmates in college ran A/UX on her SE/30. It was rad.
helf 4y ago
What’s really fun is you can upgrade the SE/30 to 128Mb
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Wow, really? Are there 16MB SIMMs that fit? I seem to recall I had thought the MacOS GUI subsystem limited it to 16MB, anyway, by packing data into the high byte of addresses... Maybe a later release fixed that?
  - helf 4y ago
    I believe it requires a 32bit clean ROM, but, yeah, you can. Lemme dig up some links. edit https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/sonmyl/se30_mods_custom_rom_128mb_ram_battery_replacement/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/sonmyl/se30_m... https://charlieharrington.com/my-new-old-apple-macintosh-se30-computer/ https://charlieharrington.com/my-new-old-apple-macintosh-se3... https://lowendmac.com/2016/memory-upgrades-mac-se30/ https://lowendmac.com/2016/memory-upgrades-mac-se30/

mgiampapa 4y ago

While impressive, it would have been a lot easier to just use a SCSI connected Ethernet adapter. Correct SCSI termination would have required sacrificing a chicken and drawing a pentagram in blood, but still easier than this project.

greenbit 4y ago
Yeah, but when you get that termination working, you get to turn to the 4th wall and shout, "It's alive! Alive! Oh, now I know what it feels like to be Woz!"
scarface74 4y ago
I never had those issues with SCSI. By 1996 I had a Zip drive, a Jaz drive, an external CDROM drive and two external hard drives connected to my PPC 6100 without issues.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Pure luck. Seriously. I wished I could get back all the hours I spent tracking down termination issues. And don't get me started on 10base-T.
  - macintux 4y ago
    10base-T or 2? I had ongoing nightmares with the latter, BBN R&D used it extensively and we’d have entire network segments flood with noise when someone bumped an AppleTalk repeater in the data closet.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Well, to be fair I was thinking of repeaters and hubs before switched became the norm, but now that you mention it, I do have a couple of horror stories regarding 10base2 as well. In particular, to stay 'on topic' regarding termination, or lack thereof. And those neat insulation piercing taps :(
4y ago

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

Sometimes I think that if it weren't for heavy cryptography and graphical interfaces, I could do so many things online even with a computer as old as this one. I could browse a textual version of HN, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram and even post and comment things! Sending HTTP packets to an open API has been a kids game for decades, unfortunately companies just don't want you to hack together your own solution

NoGravitas 4y ago
I've been reading Gopher under MacOS 8.1 (emulated) over the holidays, and it's been nice. Light WWW sites work in Netscape 3 on it, but you have to offload https to a proxy because it's not compatible with modern TLS.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Whatever you end up using for a proxy likely has 10x the horsepower of this Mac though.
- anthk 4y ago
  - gopher://hngopher.com , gopher://magical.fish , http://68k.news http://68k.news and , as a sinkhole, gopher://gopherddit.com
- samtheprogram 4y ago
  What are you using for the proxy? I am interested in breathing life into a OS 9 eMac I have.
pcurve 4y ago
I used these old machines. You'd be surprised how slow these machines are even for the most basic things! Like typing, opening folders, etc. :)

flenserboy 4y ago

Action Retro on YouTube has also been squeezing a host of things into SE/30s — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtYutLwYYXo&t=974s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtYutLwYYXo&t=974s

deltarholamda 4y ago

The SE/30 was one of the all-time great computers. The form factor was very intimate, and even portable-ish if you needed it to be. With Mode32 you could install 128MB of RAM. This was an insane amount of memory back in the day. With full RAM and the SCSI port, they made pretty good file servers once you stuck an ethernet card in the PDS slot. I had one that I used for programming back in the 90s. I used BBEdit (v4 I think), which was (and still is) a great text editor. Later, I installed NetBSD on it and used it as a local mail server. It was by far my favorite computer. I don't understand why someone isn't making a more modern computer in this form factor. Okay, you're not going to want to watch a movie on a 10-12 inch screen, but for a dedicated "I'm going to do computer things now" computer, it's very inviting.

solardev 4y ago
Well, your average Chromebook has a similar screen, more power, built-in battery, and can run Linux. And Ye olde Beaglebone or Android computer on an HDMI stick is more portable and more powerful. And if you want a new Mac, well, the Mini is an amazing machine in a tiny package, or there's also the Intel NUCs. Or for gaming, the Shuttle PCs, Razer Tomahawk, etc. Or just connect your iPad to a keyboard. Don't get me wrong, I loved those old Macs too, having learned Logo and Hypercard on them. But most of that machine was the CRT monitor plus huge components. You can pack a lot more into a lot less these days. I do miss the "cute" factor though. They were loveable in a way that modern machines just aren't.
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  > You can pack a lot more into a lot less these days. True, but even so, there is no reason to not have a little tower with a friendly face sitting on a desk, even if it's mostly empty space. Or use the empty space for something, like a door to a cubby where you can store a game pad. If you need mobility a laptop is great. But sitting hunched over at a desk using a laptop is not nearly as good as sitting upright with the screen at a more ergonomic height. Maybe it's all just nostalgia, but I think we got a lot of things right back in the day, and the toaster Mac was definitely one of those things.
4y ago

jimmyreilly 4y ago

Oh man, the SE 30 was my first machine as a kid. I still remember putting hours into shuffle puck cafe.