my Franken-SE/30

[some_random_person]

I have kept an SE/30 for ages, made a Franken-Mac with a SE/30 good logic board in an SE chassis all salvaged from the trash. I worked at Apple then, put an ethernet card in this thing, installed NetBSD on it and ran it on the LAN as a toy server for years as se30.corp.apple.com (ran a NeXT slab next to it for years). Since it was in an SE chassis I penned in "/30" years ago. I actually have an SE//30 chassis now I could swap plastics with but I kind of like how hacked it is, honestly. I kept it running through the mid-2000s, but eventually stowed it away. I started back at Apple about a year ago (doing cryptography related things), and with the help of an old friend recapped the SE/30 and got it booting again. It's running with a MacRominator II in it, I've got a NIC in the PDS slot, and an external ZuluSCSI SD<->SCSI adapter. I put a low noise fan in it as well, which was an excellent upgrade.
I'd been wanting a programmers interrupt button, happily my mother-in-law gave me her old (needing work) SE/30 that also had a programmers interrupt button on it, so I just added it to my machine, feels a bit more complete now.
I mostly boot System 6.0.8 - from chime to a working desktop in 13.5 seconds. It boots into A/UX (slowly) and has a TCP/IP stack there, happily.

 

[mdeverhart]

Super cool to have that history with that machine! What were the SE/30 and NeXT machine serving when you had them running on the Apple LAN back in the day?

 

[joshc]

That's great. What was on the pages it served?

You might enjoy my site https://machut.net/SE30Forever/ (not hosted on an SE/30, but it should render OK on an SE/30).

 

[some_random_person]

I built this thing in 1998 and at that point it was already a retro-computing system, the SE/30 has such a compact form factor it felt like a toy back then, really. I paired it with a IIGS ADB keyboard which is nice and compact too. Back then you needed boot floppies and SCSI CDs and things, nowadays retro computing is much simpler. Anyway, I knew Apple was moving to Unix, and I was running Rhapsody. I wanted to learn more about Unix in general so I set up NetBSD (then OpenBSD) on the thing and set it up as a web server, mostly served static pages that were joke pages, though it also would serve some dynamic system stats. And I have browsed that SE/30 Forever site, it's a treasure trove.
The slab was bound to corporate NetInfo, and back then it really was cool to run OpenSTEP 4.2 with it bound to a corporate NetInfo domain with NFS mounts for various resources, and OmniWeb could run modern web pages of the day. It was a bit slow, but still useful, and time has been a bit harsh with SSL/TLS. I traded off the slab to someone who would take better care of it than me, it needed work I wasn't up to doing and I only wanted to remember OpenSTEP the way it was as an integrated network-powered device. Back in the day I worked around some folks who were part of the NeXT transition so I chatted with them about the slab and they showed me how to run apps on the slab with remote windowing on my G3 running Mac OS X Server 1.0. That was due to shared DisplayPostScript stuff that Aqua killed, but was really neat at the time.

 

[Phipli]

I worked around some folks who were part of the NeXT transition so I chatted with them about the slab and they showed me how to run apps on the slab with remote windowing on my G3 running Mac OS X Server 1.0. That was due to shared DisplayPostScript stuff that Aqua killed, but was really neat at the time.

Assuming modern Mac OS still supports X11 you might be still able to do such things. You can pipe the GUI of Unix/Linux apps that use X11 to remote X11 servers using SSH. I used to do it to show linux apps from my Spark processor based NAS on my Intel Mac Pro.

It is limited with modern macs because you'd need to be doing it with applications that used X11... Which isn't actual normal Mac apps... Admittedly. Ah well!

There are 68k X11 window servers, so you might be able to run some X11 GUIs on your SE/30 even now. Ones with small windows