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My first find ever (Mac SE)..!

B

brlawyer

6502
Guys,

Here is my first ever vintage conquest (originally talked about in another thread on how to clean a Mac SE) - where I currently work I have found (buried somewhere in the organization's archives) a really nice Mac SE with one floppy + HD, plus original keyboard/mouse and a Apple CD drive (probably used with a 6100/60, no longer there) - I was able to get the whole package for free (the place used to be a Mac-only outfit until 1996)..! Too bad everything else has already been dumped by them...there was a LOT of old stuff lying around until at least 2006...

I could definitely use some help with identifying leakages, though (see pics) - or can I just try to turn it on right now? Another question is: what if I want to install System 7.5.5 on it? How the heck do I use prepare 800k floppies?


 

 

 

 

Also found this leaflet that gave me chuckles ;)


 
OK. First of all, great find!!!

Second of all, if you want to spend a little money on a lifetime (probably) tool that makes installing everything a breeze, I think the Floppy emu would be perfect. It's like $125 or something on the Bmow website. You download your disk images (I actually think 7.5.5 is installed on the ad card it comes with if you buy it with it), put them in a folder, plug it in, and there ya go! You select whatever disk you want to use! It works with apple ii s and Lisa's too so it's great for everything.

Other than that, if you had another vintage mac connected to the internet, or... actually that's it. Since it's an SE you cannot use 1.44 disks.

HOWEVER

You mentioned a cd drive? That makes this much easier (but not easier than the Floppy emu!) I've never burned cds for vintage computers so hopefully someone else can help. I'm assuming get a low speed cd..?

 
yea if your getting a flashing ? then the drive is already dead, or it was reformatted before it was put in storage. (or something got corrupt and forced its retirement). 

I would make a lido boot disk and see if you cant low-level format the HDD, it may recover! 

If not, swap it out with a SCSI2SD or even an SCA solution. 

 
Nice find!

You will need to install more memory if it is still running with only 1 megabyte. Even system 7.0/7.0.1 do not run with 1M of RAM.

At 4 megs, you will probably have a better overall experience with system 7.0.1 or 7.1 with Update 3. 7.5.5 will run, however, but I don't know what it'll look like. It would be a fun experiment worth trying, for sure.

 
Cory5412 said:
Nice find!

You will need to install more memory if it is still running with only 1 megabyte. Even system 7.0/7.0.1 do not run with 1M of RAM.

At 4 megs, you will probably have a better overall experience with system 7.0.1 or 7.1 with Update 3. 7.5.5 will run, however, but I don't know what it'll look like. It would be a fun experiment worth trying, for sure.
Click to expand...
After digging a little further, I was able to find at least original System 5.0 disks which I am gonna try right now - will keep you posted..! In the meantime, does anyone have any clue whether the AppleCD 300e Plus works with the SE? At least it does have a SCSI connection, which would greatly help in case I wanted to install newer System versions...thanks!

 
brlawyer said:
Damn, the morons must have formatted the original System disks...all I get is a spit-out with the X mark...
Click to expand...
Don't be too quick to judge, a lot of these disks just don't work any longer because of their age.  Have had plenty of disks that used to work do that to me.

 
The AppleCD 300e Plus is compatible with the Mac SE (and all other Macs with a built in SCSI port) AFAIK, the SE cannot boot directly from CD as it does not have support in ROM. In spite of that, a CD-ROM drive can prove very useful with such a machine. My suggestion for system software is System 6.0.8, or perhaps System 5 if you're feeling adventurous. My SE "Superdrive" has the full 4MB of RAM and came to me preloaded with System 7.0 on the hard drive. It was painfully slow, so I initialised the hard drive and installed 6.0.8 from floppies. If memory serves, a full installation comes on two 1.4MB disks or four 800K disks.

To add CD-ROM support, I believe an Apple add-on init (driver) and the Desktop Manager are required for your drive. I have a third-party CD drive, so I cannot use the Apple driver-- I use CD Sunrise instead.

 
My SE FDHD used to have 1mb of ram and 6.0.8. After stepping it up to 4MB, I find system 7.1 to be the balance of features and performance.

System 6 is all great and dandy until you realize you want to use Disk Copy 6.x to mount a disk image to the desktop. I never got it to work with 6.0.8, only 7 on up. Along with some other limitations.

I tried 7.5.3, and found it to be notably slower than 7.1. That, combined with the bigger RAM footprint pushed me back to 7.1 (remember, no virtual memory support on 68000 based machines, so that 4MB ceiling is a hard limit).

System 7/7.0.1 and 7.1 are all available on 800k disks. I don't recall 7.5 being available on 800k images. You would have to make a system 7 bootable Zip disk, or use something like Floppy Emu mentioned above by Johnnya101, then you could mount the 19 part (or something crazy like that) multipart 7.5.3 installer, and follow it up with 7.5.5 updates if you are really determined to run it.. and have a working hard drive and 4 megs of RAM. Just as a heads up though, if the computer still has the stock 20mb disk you won't really have room for 7.5.5... 7.0.1 (or maybe 7.1) would be pushing it if you still want space for any games/apps as well. A proper 7.5.5 install can easily consume 16-20mb on its own (just did an install of it last night).

However, with all that said, if you only have 1mb of RAM, you are stuck with 6.0.8 (until you upgrade the RAM at least). Good news is system 6 is totally usable with 1mb of RAM, with enough free to run most popular apps of that era, one at a time.

 
Also just to reiterate what others have said, I also use a 300e cd drive with my SE, and it does indeed work. However, I've never tried booting from it so I don't know if that machine is capable of booting from CDs in general. Couldn't hurt to try. However, important note. At least for my 300e, it does not like cd-rw disks, only cd-r seems to work.

 
Thank you all for the useful feedback; I agree I must probably stick with System 6 in this case - but has anyone used the floppy preparation services of Rescue My Classic Mac?

 
Rescue My Classic was a member of this forum (Krye) but has not been active for a while, never used his floppy services...

 
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