Goodwill find: Mac SE

[derFunkenstein]

My local Goodwill has this today. There was a tag that said it powered on but didn’t boot. Figured I’d give it a go.

Came with System 6.0.1 disks but either the drive doesn’t read anything or they’re damaged.

Plugged in my ZuluSCSI with the Mac Pack on an SD card and it fired right into System 6.0.8. Nice bright screen and normal SE performance. It even has 4MB of memory installed.

I opened it long enough to ensure there was no battery. Someone had pulled it at some point so no leakage.

 

[bibilit]

The most reliable unit ever built…

 

[joshc]

Agreed, SEs are excellent. There was an SE that was completely water damaged and looked like it wouldn't be salvagable, but it was revived without too much trouble. For some reason I seem to think @LaPorta might've been involved in that.

 

[bibilit]

I agree, had two bombed SEs and both were repaired with little work.

 

[derFunkenstein]

Well I’m glad to hear that for sure! I’ve never owned a compact Mac before, but I’ve wanted one. Always was afraid they’d be tough to maintain. I have fond memories of them, though.

My high school chorus teacher didn’t have an accompanist but he had a compact Mac of some kind hooked up to a MIDI keyboard and he’d notate the accompaniment in some sort of music program and use it to play piano for us. It was a super cool solution.

 

[joshc]

The SE is the best of the compacts because it isn't over complicated, doesn't have surface mount capacitors, it has a fan (so it doesn't overheat as easily as the 128k/512k/Plus models) and they used good quality parts on the analog board and power supply. The same cannot be said for the Classic / Classic II. The Colour Classic is problematic for other reasons.

 

[LaPorta]

Agreed, SEs are excellent. There was an SE that was completely water damaged and looked like it wouldn't be salvagable, but it was revived without too much trouble. For some reason I seem to think @LaPorta might've been involved in that.

It was your hard work! I did take my time on my SE that was battery bombed and was able to get it going again. Also used evaporust for the chassis which I think I passed on. Stuff works great!

 

[derFunkenstein]

The SE is the best of the compacts because it isn't over complicated, doesn't have surface mount capacitors, it has a fan (so it doesn't overheat as easily as the 128k/512k/Plus models) and they used good quality parts on the analog board and power supply. The same cannot be said for the Classic / Classic II. The Colour Classic is problematic for other reasons.

I kinda want a color classic and an 040 accelerator but they definitely have to be refurbished first.

 

[JT737]

@derFunkenstein You could always get an accelerator for your SE! I was actually beta testing an SE accelerator that was made by @zane, called the "Warp SE"; it is based on a 68000 cpu clocked at 25Mhz. It works great, and is still currently in one of my SE's. Sadly, I haven't heard anything else about the status of it........

 

[derFunkenstein]

@JT737 in the time since I made this thread I did get an accelerator. I’ve got the MacEffects Performa. It’s a 16 MHz 030 and it makes the SE fly on System 6. I doubt it’s quite as fast as an SE/30 but it’s a completely different computer now. It totally sated my desire for an SE/30 since I can’t imagine running later systems on a screen this small.

 

[Mk.558]

Was 6.0.1 ever distributed? I don't recall seeing that shipped to end-users, and wasn't able to find any disk images of 6.0.1.

 

[Chuckdubuque]

According to Wikipedia it came out with the Macintosh IIx

 

[derFunkenstein]

They seem pretty legit 6.0.1 disks. And since I didn't update the thread sooner, three of the disks are fine. The System Tools boot disk is damaged so it wouldn't boot off of it.

 

[luRaichu]

Goodwill is good again

 

[Mk.558]

There's a System 6 semi-complete collection on Macintosh Garden, but they don't have 6.0.1. The same page has 6.0.1 but manually touched. Haven't seen 6.0.1 on Apple official disk images, usually only 6.0, 6.0.3, 6.0.5, 6.0.7 and 6.0.8. 6.0.6 is rare.

 

[adespoton]

According to my writeup on the Fandom page:

System 6.0.1 (Finder 6.1, System Software Update 6.0.1) was released on September 19, 1988, and was pulled from distribution two weeks later. It was created to support the Macintosh IIx (1988). However, numerous bugs were found during initial seeding, the most prominent being bad spacing of screen fonts, and the Macintosh IIx came bundled with System 6.0.2 in its stead.

I can't recall where I got my copy of 6.0.1; it wasn't that MG one, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't off my own floppies. Checking my ADC archive, it doesn't appear to be from there either.

I'd love to see a properly imaged set of 6.0.1 floppies, even if the System Tools disk is damaged; at least so we have proper provenance for the disks.

 

[Torbar]

+1, would love to see an imaged version of 6.0.1

 

[SportBikePilot]

Curious what Goodwill was asking for it and what you paid, if I may?