Let’s Repair an Ancient Macintosh SE/30, Part 2
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A year or so later, I learned about Flyback Transformers and precisely how large of a capacitor was in the vicinity, and thanked my lucky stars I didn't accidentally discharge it.
The Se/30 will always be a special machine for me :)
There's so much classic Mac software out there to be used. It's actually pretty amazing how productive you can be on a machine so many orders of magnitude slower than today's computers. The low latency of the classic Mac UI is a testament to the genius and hard work of Bill Atkinson. [1]
[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
(NetBSD will probably run on older hardware than that too - it's just I remember people running it on Amiga's, so it's the one I'm aware of)
Of course at this point most of them replace more and more of the original hardware, so there's not much left of the original that'll still be in use.
Now we're just waiting the newest form factor that you can shrink 1995-era processing power into. Brain implants?
Sure, it can't play half the games the modern machine will, but for most other tasks Windows 10 isn't providing me much, if any, extra functionality and it is taking a hell of a lot longer to do it. Why? Are software developers just that much more terrible? Have we put too many abstraction layers in the way? Put too much extra code in place in the name of nebulously effective security? Why must we put up with this?
Fire up Windows NT4 in a vm with office 95... it’s shockingly fast. Apart from NT4 being a security mess we’ve gained what exactly?
I went “all in” on MS with a surface and office 365 but it’s only pushed me to some kind of Librem laptop next time around.
If you buy quality electrolytics and don't store the machine in a humid shed/attic they are likely to outlast you.
Apparently (according to someone I went to college with), Apple postfixed the names of their computers with 68030 processors 'x' (eg IIfx).
They couldn't call it the SEx, so they broke convention and called it the SE/30.
This attempted name change went over about as well as you would expect.
[I think they could have capitalized on the SE/x and done a really good marketing campaign if they'd not been terrified. On the other hand, opinions like this are one of the reasons I'm an engineer and not a marketing type... :-) ]
I didn't solder on new capacitors - I just got some screwdrivers and replaced the motherboard.
http://peterburk.github.io/blog/#theAppleGrows
I've collected a few old Macs, including two SE/30s, a load of LCs, Quadras, and Performas, and even some older Apple IIc, IIgs, and IIe models, and newer coloured iMacs. I also have a box of iBook G3 parts, including AirPort cards. Right now they're in the grenier of my parents' house, and I'm starting to admit that I won't get a chance to use them often. I'm sure there's value in it all, but I'd just prefer that they go to someone who truly values the machines.
If you live near Geneva or want to pay shipping, then please get in touch.
- That RS-232 port in the back? Haha, nope! It's RS-422, which looks the same except it has a different pin layout. Adapters exist, of course, but 232 is much more common.
- 3.5" floppies - neat, I remember this form factor from my childhood fondly. Wait.. no, these are 400k or 800k special format floppies, which aren't interchangeable :(
I'm pretty close to getting a working dev environment on it though, and then the sky is the limit :)
Slightly newer Macs are easier to use, particularly if they have ethernet, you can run Netatalk on a UNIX system to provide a file server. You can use any 3.5" floppy in an FDHD drive.
For example, you write as though there was a standard for low-level formatting of 3.5in floppy disks when Apple made the switch from Twiggy to Sony drives for Macintosh, and as though Apple intentionally chose not to use it.
Furthermore, Apple’s choice of GCR encoding probably had to do with not changing the hardware design too much as part of the switch; using MFM would’ve required a different floppy controller and therefore also different signaling, etc. Engineering trade-offs, not some sort of “Let’s be different!” aspiration.
When Apple adopted high density floppies, there a standard, so Apple used it and the low-level format used (MFM) was in fact compatible across vendors. That’s why you can still read and write such disks in a USB floppy drive today.
Whoa, calm down there partner.
I wasn't trying to claim it was necessarily an intentional choice to buck the common trend at the time (although my word choice does sort of suggest that), but rather that with the benefit of retrospect, it does fit the pattern.
I'm not super familiar with the tech climate at the time, but it seemed the IBM PC was pretty clearly going to be a big deal, and a lot of computer makers would clone aspects of the PC just for that fact. So, Apple at least chose not to do that.
Again, not trying to make any moralistic judgements here. I just thought it was interesting.
At the time, I don't think it was clear that the IBM PC was going to be a big deal. The PC was not IBM's first foray into personal computing, and its previous offerings in this area (such as the 5120 and the Datamaster) were not particularly successful. The PC was much more successful because IBM learned from its mistakes – it used mainstream/commodity parts in preference to IBM-proprietary ones, which saved it money, and then used that to enable a lower (and more competitive) price point. But, were people expecting that from IBM? Probably not, it was a deviation from IBM's previous behaviour, it was a surprise.
Now, as 1982 and 1983 rolled on, it became increasingly clear that the IBM PC was a success. But by then, Macintosh development was already well advanced, and they'd already locked in to incompatible designs. Trying to go back and redesign for increased IBM PC compatibility would have just delayed them even further, and a further delayed Macintosh might not have been as successful. Plus, increased IBM PC compatibility might have meant things like 5.25 inch disks, which would have been less user-friendly. (PCs didn't get 3.5 inch disks until later.)
If you first sacrificed PC compatibility, then you had very little reason to stick to e.g. PC format floppies etc. if you could do better (the Amiga also had it's own format - 880KB; though tools like "crossdos" let you mount and read/write PC formatted floppies). That accounts for a lot of the quirks of these platforms.
Another aspect was that the market was much more fragmented. The Mac "owned" the desktop publishing segment at one time due simply to Quark Xpress. The Amiga and Atari ST owned the 16bit part of the hobbyist/game market in Europe, and the Amiga owned the video/graphics effects market for some time thanks to the VideoToaster etc.. Interoperability was not as much of a concern yet. People were used to a highly fragmented market with no clear single winner where you picked different platforms for different tools.
It was first a few years into the 90's that this really changed and the PC emerged as a clear enough winner that people started investing a lot in interop.
Maybe. But then we still had machines like the Amstrad PCW.
> Early models used 3-inch floppy disks, while those sold from 1991 onwards used 3½-inch floppies, which became the industry standard around the time the PCW series was launched. [...]
> All models except the last included the Locoscript word processing program, the CP/M Plus operating system, Mallard BASIC and the LOGO programming language at no extra cost.
That's how I'd put it. When I found out that the replacement for their 3.5" 'Superdrive' cost $400 (while functionally-equivalent PC parts cost 1/10 of that), I started thinking of leaving Mac hardware behind. When they dropped serial ports I dropped them.
And at the time, serial didn't automatically imply RS-232. RS-422 was a totally valid choice, and typically the technically better option.
It would make more sense if AppleTalk used it, but it used a common ground, which eliminates the benefits of the balanced signals.
That was huge -- plug and play networking for mortals.
Source: worked at Farallon way back when.
It's true that RS-422 was technically better, but it was only ever used in the Apple ecosystem.
Existing RS-232 hardware needed an adaptor or a complete redesign. This severely limited the appeal of the Mac in industrial automation, scientific control, and electronic development, and often made basic printing more complicated than it needed to be.
Realistically, most of those were never going to be prime Mac markets. Even so, sales and market niches were lost to the PC and to competitors like HP.
E.g. Commodore used IEEE-488 variations on it's 8-bit lines. Many others were used by others. Peripherals were commonly expected to be specific to a specific computer manufacturers products still.
In retrospect it's clear it wasn't ideal, but at the time RS-232 was just one more alternative that didn't really stand out as a winner yet.
These old computers are very easy to work on and there are plenty out there in broken or semi-working state in need of rescue. Good work saving another classic from the scrapheap!
My most recent SE/30 exhibited this failure, but came back to life after I repaired all the axial and SMD capacitors.
I currently have it working with 80MB of RAM, and a SCSI2SD.
It’s got the following OS installed:
* System 7.5.5 * A/UX 3.1 * NetBSD 6 * debian Linux
I’m currently working with one of my electronics guru colleagues on designing a new PDS slot 100Mbit Ethernet card for the SE/30, using a modern Ethernet interface chip, since working Ethernet cards are getting hard to come by.
I was planning to get A/UX on the thing a few years ago and see what I could still do with it when the failure appeared and I kindof shelved the whole thing. Happy to have a log I can draw tips from.
Although the more common romanization would have it "shimashima"
Though not as old as when my 9 year old found out that I didn't have Youtube as a child and followed it up by asking if we had electricity back then...