Mac SEx :) (sort of)

[LCGuy]

Just won an SE/30 logic board on eBay. With this I'll not only be able to bring my SE back to life, but also give it a nice little upgrade in the process. As for the thread title - I always said that if I were to ever get an SE/30, I would refer to it as my Mac SEx

 

[mcdermd]

Slot a IIfx ROM into it and the name would even make sense!

 

[olePigeon]

Or a dougg3 ROM.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

SEx derives from the fact that the SE/30 is the love child/bastardization of the SE and IIcx. GttMFH2e says that the sire was the IIx, but the press of the day described it as a IIcx scrunched into the SE form factor.

With grayscale and a cache slot in addition to the PDS, it could have been so SExi indeed. B&W and just an '030 PDS made it kinda MEH for me back in the day. I had one for a while, a freeb from Goodwill in Da Bronyx, but I never even bothered to put the network card in there.

 

[MinerAl]

I thought the SEx joke was because the 030 upgrade to the II was the IIx, so the 030 upgrade to the SE should naturally be the SEx. (And the LCII should've been the LCx, and the Classic II the Classix, etc)

 

[LCGuy]

Yep, correct - the 'x' stands for "expanded", so at the time they were going to bring out the IIx (Mac II, expanded), and SEx (SE, expanded)...then quickly realised that they cannot release a computer called the SEx.

 

[jongleur]

I had the same problem with the document system SCRIPT/VS on the mainframe. The macro language was integer only, and the equivalent command to the BASIC LET statement was .SE (SEt symbol)

.se a = &b + 2

So I wrote an enhancement to provide floating point variables, statistical functions, square root, and other functions not available. So of course I installed it as .SEX (SEt symbol eXtended)

Management had a different opinion, and insisted that it be implemented as .SEE (SEt symbol Extended)

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The SEx came out a four months after the IIx and two months prior to the IIcx. A check of the ASICs on the SE/30's MoBo against the IIx and IIcx Block Diagrams in the DevNotes would be the definitive DNA test for the heritage of the SE/30. My money would be on the IIcx if there was any ASIC evolution during the downsizing of the IIx to the IIcx and SE/30 form factors.

The SE/30 appears to be of the same development cycle as the IIcx, so I guess the SEx and IIcx might also be viewed as fraternal twins.

 

[uniserver]

now I have to pull out both boards and inspect them carefully,

I bet you are right, just the SE/30 doesn't have Nubus slots and IC's associated, eg. transceivers. Like the IIcx.

I bet the GLUE chip is the same/ or not because the SE/30 has onboard video.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Pull the DevNotes and check the diagrams of all three systems, if they're available. Doubtful, they're in GttMFH2e, just checked, same block diagram page for the x and cx.

Looks like they chopped the BBU ASIC of the SE into a pile of Video Logic crap, a Video ROM and a modicum of VRAM to put Crappy@$$ Compact Video, slightly improved by the dedicated VRAM, in there for the worst Video on a MacII ever and, barring any improvement (doubtful) in the Classics, a slightly better Video implementation than the SE's.

BIG WHOOP! Shoulda' been grayscale from day one.

 

[trag]

BIG WHOOP! Shoulda' been grayscale from day one.

Hmmm. Was the DTP revolution going by the time the SE/30 was designed? And if so, was Apple aware of it?

I imagine that the Apple designers' thoughts about the SE/30 were that it would be a powerful, but basic desktop business machine, and there was little need for grayscale images in documents, reports and spreadsheets. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it was really DTP that gave a need for grayscale on the SE/30's screen.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

PageMaker (the first page layout program) and Fontographer (the first illustration program) were written on and for the 128k, 512k and Plus as early as 1984. DTP was rolling bigtime by the release of Illustrator 88, PageMaker 3 and the intro of Aldus FreeHand (based upon Fontographer) . . . all during 1988, which I like to refer to as the dawn of the Service Bureau age.

PageMaker was released in July 1985, and relied on Adobe's PostScript page description language. For output, it used the Apple LaserWriter, a PostScript laser printer. PageMaker for the PC was released in 1986, but by then the Mac was already the de facto DTP platform, with Adobe Illustrator (released in 1987) and Adobe Photoshop (released in 1990) completing the suite of graphic design software.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldus_Corporation
If Apple didn't know about DTP by the 87-88-89 SE/30, IIcx, IIci product development cycle . . .

. . . but Apple can be kinda dense! :

Speaking of dense . . . the first Mac II with video circuitry (the SE/30 kluge) had dedicated VRAM . . . two products later, the high end IIci comes out with vampire video?????

Dense may not be the word . . .

 

[markyb86]

hold up shouldn't the se/30 be the seXXX?

ha

 

[Charlieman]

Hmmm. Was the DTP revolution going by the time the SE/30 was designed? And if so, was Apple aware of it?

I agree more or less with Trash. Conservative buyers could get an SE and plug in a 17"+ monochrome monitor. The graphics card provided tear off menus, so the DTP operator could assemble a palette of tools on the SE built-in display with the work on the big monitor. The advantage of using a big monitor on a compact Mac was that the operator could disconnect the display and carry the SE off to the typesetter.

The SE/30 took this a stage further, so the external monitor could be greyscale or colour. There was no need for the built-in monitor to be greyscale because it was primarily intended for palettes, desk accessories etc.

DTP was not the only industry that used this work process. Compact Mac plus big monitor was a popular configuration for scientists and engineers.

 

[Charlieman]

Looks like they chopped the BBU ASIC of the SE into a pile of Video Logic crap, a Video ROM and a modicum of VRAM to put Crappy@$$ Compact Video, slightly improved by the dedicated VRAM, in there for the worst Video on a MacII ever and, barring any improvement (doubtful) in the Classics, a slightly better Video implementation than the SE's.

That description makes sense from a design perspective. Apple needed a new compact graphics system for the 68030 to work with Color QuickDraw and NuBus Slot Manager. The graphics system had to have just enough functionality to allow applications written for Color QuickDraw to run badly. (The Classic is a cost reduction rework of the Plus/SE and uses Plus/SE video methodology; the Classic II supports Color QuickDraw and presumably has yet another graphics system.)

I'd guess that Apple had grown so big by this time that the SE/30 and IIci engineers may not have been communicating well. NIH is Apple's most famous corporate problem.