The SE/30 as a Part of Classic Macs

[GerrySch]

My opinions are mine alone and my interest in sharing this is to generate debate and to spur others to express their opinions. For a long time I avoided the Macintosh because I was pissed at how Apple had terminated the Apple II line after supporting them for so long, giving them the time and money to build and screw up the Apple III (no fan, PLEASE!), build and sell the Lisa for 'out of their mind' prices.

Well you can only go so far with any of the Apple II computers (my anger had faded) and in the early 2000's, I decided to start looking seriously at Macs. I really liked the sharp B&W picture of the compact Macs but the hardware of the first couple of generations was anemic. Given their original price, the bang for the buck was low and I know I'd get frustrated waiting for the Macs to work and no way was I going to play the floppy shuffle.

When the SE/30 was released I knew that one was what I was waiting for. A 68030 uP, lots of potential RAM and a hard drive. But I couldn't afford a $5K computer. It would probably fail long before I finished paying it off. So, over the years I pined after the SE/30 but didn't get it as faster and more capable Macs came along. My first new Mac was an iMac G5 with a 20" display. Only recently, have I learned that the white G5 iMacs were crap. I still have mine in its box. It will be interesting how it's survived these last 10 years.

Finally, I reached a point where I wanted an SE/30 to experience that compact, B&W display for myself. The previous generations hold no interest for me and they seem like weak attempts to improve the line. I know that memory was expensive back then so having a Meg of RAM in a Mac to me should have been the starting point, not 128K and charging $3000 dollars for it. Apple threw everything behind the Mac which I think was very stupid. They should have kept the Apple II line going until they could develop the Mac. It still chaps my hide how the Apple II was tossed to the scrap heap. But, that was long ago and Apple still makes good products and my wife and I can afford them.

Okay, I'm done and feel much better. Now what do you think?

Gerry

 

[joshc]

It will be interesting how it's survived these last 10 years.

Probably not well. Be prepared to replace a significant amount of capacitors.

They should have kept the Apple II line going until they could develop the Mac.

Which likely would’ve led them down the same road Commodore went down.

It still chaps my hide how the Apple II was tossed to the scrap heap.

By 1993, the world had moved on. They didn’t need it anymore. Nothing lasts forever.

 

[cheesestraws]

It still chaps my hide how the Apple II was tossed to the scrap heap

Why?

1992, the ARM6 macrocell was released and the ARM250 (based on ARM3) was in mass market computers.

The age of the 8-bit micro was very, very dead.

 

[s_pupp]

The depreciation of Macs back then was truly impressive. In 1991, I was irritated with how slow my Mac Plus was in comparison with the SE/30 I was using in the lab. I estimated that it would be about 10 years until I could afford to spend the $4,000+ for an SE/30.

Ten years passed, and I bought one equipped with a Micron Xceed card for $10.

 

[cheesestraws]

Ten years passed, and I bought one equipped with a Micron Xceed card for $10.

Yes. Technology was moving fast. Much faster than now, much more radical change than now.

 

[jasonfortheworld]

One of the reasons I came to love retro computing was seeing how rapid things changed 30+ years ago. It's such a breath of fresh air learning about all the genuinely innovative feats of engineering that happened. Not to mention companies weren't afraid to make weird or bizarre products that challenge the status quo of the era.

 

[Arbee]

Why?

1992, the ARM6 macrocell was released and the ARM250 (based on ARM3) was in mass market computers.

The age of the 8-bit micro was very, very dead.

There was supposed to be an updated IIgs introduced in the fall of 1991 on a satellite broadcast to user groups along with the LC IIe Card, Mac System 7, an Apple II Ethernet card, and IIgs System 6. It would've had a built-in SuperDrive and SCSI HDD, a SWIM instead of the IWM, DMA SCSI capability, and SIMMs for RAM expansion instead of the previous proprietary cards. Apple employees told people it was going to be shown but it wasn't there when everyone tuned in, because Sculley had killed it and the Ethernet card and started winding down the Apple II division.

An early production batch of Ethernet cards in retail boxes later escaped from Apple's clutches, as did multiple running prototypes of the updated IIgs. So it was all verified.

As a business decision and in hindsight it makes perfect sense, but actually being bait-and-switched like that seriously sucked. WDC had announced a 32-bit 6502 to succeed the 16-bit 65816, so there was in theory a future for the A2. But once their most likely customer cut the A2 they never bothered manufacturing it.

Given that Apple was basically a bunch of unsupervised teams running wild at the time, I'm going to guess that preparation for the broadcast was the first time Apple executives found out this stuff was happening. It's easy to see it as the same kind of thing that later led to Pink and Copland, not to mention the hardware designers adding features that only A/UX used.

 

[adespoton]

One of the reasons I came to love retro computing was seeing how rapid things changed 30+ years ago. It's such a breath of fresh air learning about all the genuinely innovative feats of engineering that happened. Not to mention companies weren't afraid to make weird or bizarre products that challenge the status quo of the era.

It was crazy at the time, because things were changing so fast that the new computer tech was almost wholly incompatible with the old computer tech within 5 years. I've bought all-in-ones and laptops the entire time solely because I watched how others purchased and assembled components with the idea that they'd continuously upgrade, only to find that the bus on their mainboard wasn't compatible with any of this year's new tech, so they had to start over again.

All my all-in-one/laptop Macs have lasted me comfortably for 5-7 years as daily drivers since 1989. I'm still using my 2008 MacBook Pro to get real work done today (but then, I'm a sucker for punishment; I was using a Color Classic to get real work done in 2001).

 

[Mk.558]

I'm more interested in what you could do with an Apple // (let's go with //e, because that was realistically the most popular) that you couldn't do with someone else.

cheesestraws is right. 8 bit computing by the early 90's was dead for serious work. We'll pretend Microsoft's 16 bit stuff never existed.

 

[4seasonphoto]

Best not to attempt powering up that old iMac G5 until you replace those capacitors, assuming that they haven't leaked their corrosive guts over everything.

For me, the early days of the personal computing revolution were fun! Stuff could be super-expensive, and there were so many cool ideas which ended up as dead-ends (dead-ends could be fascinating too!), but I think there was a general sense of being a part of something big, and although no one really knew what the future of computing would look like, we were certain it was going to be amazing.

I was irked when Newton got axed, but I got over it. In retrospect, Newton really was kind of useless: Lots of creative ideas, but too ambitious for 1990s technology. And ultimately, we got it back in a much more useful form as iOS!

Today's computing scene seems useful-but-boring, and maybe that's an inevitable outcome of a successful revolution.

 

[joshc]

The previous generations hold no interest for me and they seem like weak attempts to improve the line.

The SE wasn't a weak attempt, it can take 4MB and had a built-in hard drive. It was significantly cheaper than the SE/30 but just as capable for many tasks, despite the lack of '030 CPU. My dad ran his graphic design business on a single SE in the late 80s.

 

[Snial]

<snip> I avoided the Macintosh because I was pissed at how Apple had terminated the Apple II line <snip>

Jumping architectures has been done 4 times now over 5 CPUs: 6502/65186 -> 68K -> PowerPC -> Intel -> ARM (Apple Silicon). After each switch, the previous architecture was abandoned after 3 to 5 years.

So, really I'd say it was part of the Apple approach to computing.

I reached a point where I wanted an SE/30 to experience <snip>

The SE/30 was a legend from the moment it was released:



I think that every Apple computer generation embodies its own character, so there's a role for even the earliest Macs. For example, I actually do like the Fat Mac, because it was the first kind of Mac I ever used. And in 1986 it was a revolution, to me. The floppy shuffle was part of the charm, believe it or not, because an 800kB disk was 4x the storage capacity I had on my QL and the 12cm Sony floppy disk just seemed incredible! The 'anaemic' performance simply made me aware of how much computing power was needed for a convincing GUI.

 

[ESM-NL]

The SE wasn't a weak attempt, it can take 4MB and had a built-in hard drive. It was significantly cheaper than the SE/30 but just as capable for many tasks, despite the lack of '030 CPU. My dad ran his graphic design business on a single SE in the late 80s.

I even did graphic design full color work on a Mac Plus in the 90s for a while, using Illustator 88 and QuarcPress 3.1 besides my normal job in a printing company. Worked fine, even with a 1bit 512x384 screen.

 

[Snial]

I even did graphic design full color work on a Mac Plus<snip>

Whaaat - how was that done?

 

[ESM-NL]

Whaaat - how was that done?

Well, both Illustrator and QuarkPress could work independently from having a monochome or color monitor. In Illustrator you can fill shapes with a color difined by CYMK colors. The only thing you need to fill in are the percentages of each separate process color. Illustrator has also the PMS color system build in (that also could be converted into process colors). So the only thing I need was a real PMS color table, which i had. It was an old one from the printing company I worked for. With that, even today, It is still possible to do full color DTP work on a computer like the Mac Plus, SE, SE/30 or Classic I/II.

 

[joshc]

Whaaat - how was that done?

My dad did colour work on his SE too, he had PANTONE books, and would get the colour proofs done at a local printers in town.

 

[adespoton]

The floppy shuffle was part of the charm, believe it or not, because an 800kB disk was 4x the storage capacity I had on my QL and the 12cm Sony floppy disk just seemed incredible! The 'anaemic' performance simply made me aware of how much computing power was needed for a convincing GUI.

One thing I came to appreciate about the 800Kb "floppy shuffle" was how for the most part it "just worked". You could actually use the computer while shuffling the disks, and everything rarely stalled while the OS waited for you to insert some random disk just to make sure it existed.

This was lost with the HD floppies and later OSes; I guess enough was still stored in ROM and RAM in the early days that the system disk didn't need to put in many appearances.

Compare that to nowadays, where my computer gets nervous if it can't just randomly create a 20GB file cache it's likely to never use.