First Mac SE

[photonpunk]

This is my first Mac, an SE running system 6. I found it at an estate sell a couple of weeks ago (paid $25). It came with an Apple Extended keyboard, original mouse, manuals, and a bunch of software. Digging through the disks, I even found a copy of Hypercard, which has been fun to play with.

I'm not sure what I'll use it for, I mostly bought it to tinker with. I like experimenting with older technology. I'm waiting for the capacitors to loose their charge now so I can open it up safely; then I'll probably at least upgrade the ram. I'd like to do something cool with it, just not sure yet what that might be. Any suggestions? (I can program in a few languages and have been experimenting with serial input/output, so I'm sure I can find an interesting use for it. Maybe use it to control a serial device? Maybe turn it into some kind of server? I like the bare bones OS, runs lightning fast so I'd like to leave it on there and work off that if possible.)

 

[finkmac]

Nice, did it have anything in it's slot?

 

[photonpunk]

Do you mean the floppy slot? No. If you mean some internal expansion slot, I don't know, haven't opened it up yet.

 

[finkmac]

I was referring to it's PDS slot, but I guess nothing was installed that added any other ports.

 

[photonpunk]

Not that I can tell. Just the ports that I would expect anyway.

 

[Schmoburger]

Nice find! I have a few SE's myself... in fact my first ever Mac was an SE with dual floppies. I currently still have an FDHD and an SE Superdrive, and somewhere I have an SE/30.

I always liked to play with the networking side of old Macs... one had a localtalk network bridged into my home ethernet which was cool. Localtalk, whilst very very rudimentary in terms of what it can do as a network by todays standards, can be a lot of fun to play with if you can get hold of the serial trancievers for it. I still have a box full of them somewhere or another. And I still used to use my Plus to type up school work as a teenager just for the fun of it, and so i could annoy my violently anti-mac, IT teacher by telling her how my TVET assignments were typed up on a 20 year old mac and printed from a 15 year old Apple Laserwriter II connected up with a serial-based network

And the SE... well, its still set up in my dads garage for when I get bored working on Volkswagens and decide I'd rather play Cannon Fodder or Shufflepuck Cafe heheh

 

[antony701]

Nice find. I've been looking at some of those machines... Still no luck here.

 

[Mk.558]

Not that I can tell. Just the ports that I would expect anyway.

There are a couple of things you can do to it. An SE can be a bit of a sleeper Mac.

1) Obtain a RJ45 Ethernet card. Although now that I think about it, I'd probably rather use the PDS slot for #2.

2) Obtain a 68020 accelerator. SEs are pretty slow. Part of the reason (unlike the SE/30) is that the processor is pretty much running at 75% capacity because 1 of every 4 cycles of the CPU has to be spent to redraw the display.

3) Upgrade to max RAM. Won't cost much (I've literally thrown away 1MB SIMMs): if your logic board has the much-despised plastic RAM SIMM clips, be extra careful. Better to break a worthless 256KB SIMM than break the clips.

4) Add a second floppy drive, with a custom bracket to hold the hard drive towards the back of the case. This was a somewhat popular option back in the day. The fickle nature of floppy disks mean (my IIfx back in the day was like this) that if a disk doesn't read in one drive, simply put it in the other one.

5) System 6.0.8 and 7.0.1 or 7.1 Pro is all you really need. System 7 should be great with an accelerator.

A SE/30 upgrade is also possible, but a good SE is always useful to have around. Good machine to run pre-System 6 OSes.

 

[krye]

Nice. Always love the SE, it's my default go-to Classic Mac. Such a little workhorse. I use mine almost daily. So expandable.

 

[finkmac]

Where would you get one of these custom braces, anyway?

I've seen one of those in vectronixappleworld's SE.

 

[photonpunk]

Yikes, I could buy two SE/30's for what they're selling the accelerators for on ebay. I like the idea of networking it though, will have to keep my eye out for the serial equipment for it. Definitely want to get it up to 4 mb of ram too.

Question: can you play any text rpg's on these (like Zork)?

 

[Mk.558]

You should. Most of the early text RPGs weren't that demanding anyways.

As for the accelerators, just keep your eye open or better, ask on LEM Swap. They're around, shouldn't be more than $30 or so. (It's only when you get to stuff like the Diimo 50MHz 68030 or that 68040 accelerator the SE/30 that the price rockets. Or the greyscale adapter.)

 

[onlyonemac]

It looks like it's in amazing condition! Almost unused.