30th anniversary of the Macintosh SE/30 | Hacker News Reader

30th anniversary of the Macintosh SE/30

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41 pointsnpunt10 comments

Fun fact: If Apple had stuck to it's prior product naming conventions, this model would have been called the Macintosh SEx.

The Macintosh SE was the name of the first compact Mac with an internal expansion slot (at the time the SE was said to stand for system expansion), and that internal expansion slot was carried over to the SE/30.

Previous Macs using Motorola's 68030 CPU had been given the X suffix in their product name, like the Mac IIx.

i wonder if kids today share the same excitement regarding technology as we did in those times. Everytime my dad brang a new computer home , i was literally dreaming of it afterward. Every new generation of computer were letting you do things so obviously different, it was incredible.

I remember up to this day a dream i had when « my » mac (the one with the portrait format monitor) suddenly turned into a color monitor.

> I remember up to this day a dream i had when « my » mac (the one with the portrait format monitor) suddenly turned into a color monitor.

I had this dream too! Waking up to 4 color grayscale was a total bummer.

Macs seemed quite cool at the time, but I never looked at the price. Considering Amigas and Acorn Archimedes were available for a lot less, I now just can't see what made people buy Macs then. The SE/30 was over US$4,000.00!

Yeah they were super expensive at MSRP. They did get heavily discounted after launch though, unlike today's Apple products. And the software available for Macs was really what allowed them to price the way they did.

I suspect most of them were being bought by businesses. At the time I was selling QMS PostScript printers (for £5000+ each) into publishers and marketing agencies. They were all running Pagemaker and Illustrator.

It's hard to remember exactly how far ahead the Mac UI was back then. I had a series of Amstrad 8-bits at home and had used Amigas and Arcs extensively at school, but on going to university in 1992, I was determined to buy my first Mac (a IIsi). It was just so much more enjoyable and creative to work with than anything else out there - not just the OS but the care taken over third-party software.

The Archimedes never took off unfortunately. If it had been the “standard” PC we would be a decade ahead in computing now, maybe more

The OS.

I love Amigas. I still have two: a 1000 and a 2000HD.

The OS, yes even System 6, was more user-friendly than Workbench. It also looked better. Workbench was made to be compatible with televisions and it shows. Being made with TV output in mind may have helped it find a niche in multimedia but niches are risky sectors to run businesses in.

I don’t think native networking, of any kind whatsoever, was supplied with AmigaOS until version 3. By then Commodore was on its deathbed.

In 1985 you could buy a few Macintoshes, a LaserWriter, some cables, and one large external hard disk drive and someone who had never, ever, touched a computer before could set up multiple desktop publishing workstations, a shared networked printer, and a file server.

This was impossible on the Amiga, and PCs for that matter.

In grad school I called mine "snot on a doorknob" - it was that "slick" / fast. The internal HD felt almost magic after slamming so many floppies.

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