My Dad gave me his old SE

[krye]

My Dad picked up an SE when they were new. He used it for years, but when work went PC-only, the SE sort of slipped out of usage and at some point ended up in the garage. My parents moved to the West coast in 2000. (I live on the East coast.) So I thought that I'd never see that SE again.

My parents were here last week on vacation so my Dad finally dug it out of the garage and brought it to me. It was still in the Apple canvas carrying bag. Despite that, it's pretty dirty. It must have been sitting around for a few yeas before it ended up back in the bag.

The 20MB hard drive was also dead. I found a spare 700MB drive on my parts shelf so I threw it in and gave it a fresh install of 6.0.8. This is my second SE. My other SE has a maxed 4MB of RAM and and Ethernet card, but I think I'll hold a special place in my heart for this guy since it did belong to my Dad and it's the only surviving Mac left from my childhood.

Once cool thing is that he also had a 3rd party floppy drive that he forgot he even had. That was a nice bonus.



Everything appears to work great. It just needs a good cleaning and a little retr0brite action.

 

[Macdrone]

Congrats. I don't have any personal gear myself. My first Mac was a 638cd. I have it's "sister" (ordered same time) as we received it from my mother in law. I moved so much I never got to keep anything. My dad is a logger/truck driver and my mom was a beautician so I only saw computers in school. The Apple II being the first, then a IIgs. I took typing on a TRS-80 type /// I think. I wish mine was spread out but I'm the only tech geek in my local family.

 

[krye]

My Dad used to order whatever he wanted for work. They paid for it, but it was his to keep. (The crazy 80s right? Companies used to spend money like it was water).

Anyway, he had a 512 and a Plus. We don't know what happened to the 512. The Plus did come home when he bought the SE. I used the Plus for years but it eventually died in the mid 90s and we threw it out. If I'd only known 10 years later I'd be bitten by the vintage bug!

My Dad's pretty sure it all got stolen from work. He had a portion of the warehouse cornered off for his stuff. He had a TI994A and a few Apple IIs and //cs in there. He's pretty sure the 512 was in there too. Anyway, back in the 90s the company moved from one building to the other and all his stuff "disappeared". He's pretty sure one of the warehouse guys stole it all.

So the SE is the only remaining Mac from my childhood that still remains. All my other Macs have been acquired over the years from friends who have donated them to my collection and the ones that I've purchased on eBay.

 

[CC_333]

How wonderful!

We still have pretty much all but one of the many computers we've bought over the years (our very first computer, a PC running Windows 95, disappeared sometime around 1997-1999, though I still have some software for it floating around, and probably a power cord).

Pretty much most computers we've bought subsequently were Macs, the first of which were a Rev. C iMac and shortly afterwards a Lombard PowerBook.

I'm glad I was able to keep them all, because I get very sentimental ;D .

c

 

[volvo242gt]

Nice. Maybe the thing to do is to swap the ethernet card and RAM to this one, then find the rare Desktop Manager extension for System 6.0.8 that allows it to use the later Desktop DB and DF files from System 7. That way, you can dual boot into both 6.0.8 and 7.x. Let your dad's old Mac be the fully loaded SE...

-J

 

[krye]

That's exactly what I have planned. I'm going to max the RAM and install the NIC from the other SE. The other SE will then go to the shelf as a backup. The other SE's case is in lousy shape too. It was the 2nd machine I ever attempter to retr0brite. I ended up scorching the plastic in some spots, so my Dad's SE is definitely the nicer looking machine.

 

[volvo242gt]

Good deal. Does either machine have the FDHD ROMs in it? If not, that might be a nice little upgrade to do as well.

-J