Mac SE/30 Odyssey | Hacker News Reader

Mac SE/30 Odyssey

axio.ms

158 pointsals052 comments

My family’s first Mac was an SE. The store mistakenly gave us an SE/30 and we had that for a few weeks until the store figured it out and made us swap it for a normal SE. :-(

That was System 6, with HyperCard 1.1 or 1.2. I think the reason OOP has always made sense to me was because I unwittingly learned it from HyperCard. System 6 also came with several animated tutorials, explaining the desktop metaphor, wysiwyg editing, and so on. I’ve never really seen free training materials like that since.

My mum bought one for the family, and my dad complained for years about how much it cost.

Great machine at the time, though.

Edit: wiki sez "Introductory price US$4,369 (equivalent to $9,120 in 2020)", so I get where he was coming from :)

By the time I managed to get my hands on an SE/30 (borrowed from a college) the price was 'down' to $3500. Instead I settled for a IIsi (20MHz 68030 instead of 15-2/3MHz, same RAM, less expansion, no L-2 cache).

The IIsi killed its floppy-drive because the fan sucked dust through it. It was then that I discovered that in 1991 a replacement 'Superdrive' floppy cost $400 (~ price of iPhone 12 Pro today). I wonder if Bukowski's IIsi died that way.

[https://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/charles-bukow...]

I had a work-assigned IIsi that I swapped the crystal on (against my boss’ wishes). I seem to recall I went from a 40MHz crystal to 50MHz (CPU clock being half of that, so went from 20MHz to 25MHz to compare closely with the IIci of the day), but it’s been a few decades.

>The IIsi killed its floppy-drive because the fan sucked dust through it.

Wow, thanks for solving one of my childhood mysteries, now i know why my dad had always some tape over the floppy-drive on his IIsi :)

And now I know why the floppy drive on our IIsi died :)

Well it did not....probably because of no dust in it? ;)

> Well it did not....probably because of no dust in it? ;)

Sorry misread the "our" ;)

Ah memories. My first "own" computer was an inherited IIsi with a A4 16 grayscale monitor. Even when it was way past its usefulness I still tricked it out with max RAM and a Nubus FPU. Never ran into the dust problem though…

Our first family computer was an SE too, then dad got an SE/30 for work which I got to play on.

Such an incredible computer for its time, and still loads of fun thanks to a community of collectors/modifiers/developers keeping them going. I’ve fixed up an SE recently and am now hunting for an SE/30.

If you're ever feeling nostalgic for HyperCard, check out https://livecode.com/ -- clearly designed based on HC, but includes many modern features and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

So then they what? Sold a used computer as new?

It would normally be sold as “open box”.

The SE/30 is such a fantastic, charismatic little box. The community is always cooking up new things, plus there were a bunch of lesser known contemporaneous add-ons that expand its functionality (touchscreen! greyscale!). I summarized all of these here for the 30th anniversary of the SE/30:

https://nickpunt.com/blog/se-30th-anniversary/

Regarding the lack of a CLI in Mac OS/System 7 as mentioned in the preface: There was the MPW shell, basically an extended C shell. It was available for free, but had to be installed as an extra. (It came as part of the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop [0], but could be run stand-alone.) – Mentioning it just to get the word out. :-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...

https://web.archive.org/web/20211002213818/https://axio.ms/b...

Just had a forgotten, wonderful feeling seeing some of the old Apple ads linked in the article.

I still remember this (currently weird) sense of hopefulness and progress when seeing late 80s to 90’s Apple ads. Yes, I understand it was marketing, but as the kid/teen I was at the time, it spoke to me and helped to shape my outlook even today.

Even just seeing that first ad screenshot of the hand over the keyboard with that particular lighting that was used made me nostalgic.

I was fortunate to be able to buy an SE/20 in the mid-80’s or so. I have good memories of using it at my dining room table, drinking coffee and coding in C while my wife and children played together.

I still have an SE/30 with A/UX and network card, 8MB RAM and 80MB SCSI disk. It still booted, last time I tried it. Maybe 15 years ago? Time to change out capacitors and battery, I guess, before I try powering it again.

Me too -- It was a discard from school, that I repaired and started my unix adventure with NetBSD on. Figured out how to get a serial console on it, and had my sibling and I on a text-only AOLIM client while dialed out with PPP way back in the day...

Last I saw it, the something leaked out of it, and it needs some cleaning ....

At least snip the battery out so it can’t do any self-harm!

Not sure if this is just because of site overload or intentional but the way the non-progressive jpeg's slowly load from different directions due to the exif rotations add to the experience of reading the article for me.

In the early 90s I recall seeing that one common desktop publishing configuration that was high-power/relatively low cost was a SE/30, with like a 40MB hard drive, a third party video card in it, and an external 20" black and white tight dot pitch CRT monitor.

My high school journalism department had a couple macs including an SE/30 with the 20"? apple monitor.

It was really nice to be able to work on a two-page spread in QuarkXpress but PAINFULLY slow to redraw the entire layout or an ad in Illustrator 88.

Those were the days.

My boss back in the late eighties had an se/30 with an external portrait display, it was pretty funky for the time. We had to struggle with the normal displays which were just a bit too small for type setting academic papers. Having said that, we spent a lot of time in telnet to a Unix box running LaTeX for proper publications.

I had an SE/30! It was a big upgrade from my Mac Plus, even with the external floppy drive, because I could finally compile Pascal code without having to swap discs. All of this was a HUGE upgrade from my //e with only one drive where I had to swap floppies for Apple Pascal constantly.

The SE/30 was a seriously useful computer and a ridiculously fun machine to use every day.

And it was a good computer for years. I don't remember how long I used one, but I'd wager I got 5-6 years out of it.

I had a Mac Plus and found a card that would clip-on to the 68000 and takeover the system at boot time. It had a fast 68020 and 68882 math coprocessor on it. It also came with a fan to get the extra heat out of the box. Ran great. Good times.

I wish I understood hardware at this level. His “PS I built a scsi disc drive emulator with a rasberrypi” is an awesome humble brag.

I'm always in awe of people who have such advanced knowledge of hardware down to the bare metal level. I know there's probably plenty of people on HN who think nothing of it, but for someone such as myself from a software background who just tinkers with hardware as a side-hobby, it verges on wizardry and I absolutely love it.

wrt wizardry:

“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect” - Teller

I started on hardware.

I don't really miss it, but I do like connecting to things.

FWIW I think the only way hackers learn this stuff is by reading and then one day going "Huh I understand CPU caches [or similar]".

It isn't forbidden knowledge by any means, so just follow your curiosity and see where it takes you.

For interfaces, I would maybe start with something like the art of electronics just for the basics.

If I want to understand the basics of some bus or whatever, I usually do some tactical googling alongside terms like "FPGA" to see what comes up so I don't have to make sense of a 150000 page spec.

In fairness, that's been a thing you can just -do- for years now

Why is it a thing you could do, you mean? Using the GPIOs?

RaSCSI is a virtual SCSI device emulator that runs on a Raspberry Pi. It runs in userspace, and can emulate several SCSI devices at one time. There is a control interface to attach / detach drives during runtime, as well as insert and eject removable media. This project is aimed at users of vintage Macintosh computers from the 1980's and 1990's.

https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI

It's aimed at vintage Macintosh, but wouldn't it work with any old computer using SCSI? I have an HP machine that I would be happy to resuscitate with a new install of HP-UX, but its CD drive is dead.

I'm not here to take the wind out of his sails, but SATA and SCSI are mostly interchangable these days. He's probably referring to a software solution that he deployed with a Raspberry Pi as the deployment platform. Still impressive, but relatively common sysops knowledge at a certain level.

This is not SCSI as you know it. This is “antique” 8-bit parallel SCSI. The protocols might be related but the signaling is most certainly not.

As a chip designer, I find it satisfying that the shorted PCB caused the chip to heat up, but not fail. Max currents limited by design to avoid destructive failure. Fixed the short, chip (and system) came up fine. If only software was that robust...

This is wonderful account and a tour de force debugging. I have an SE/30 with 128 MiB for the same reason (sans Ethernet, sadly). The #1 thing I'd like to try one day is bringing up Mk68Linux (think that's the name).

Possibly due to being in Europe (think $$$), I completely missed the whole Macintosh experience until OS/X came out. Having devoured the development history of the Macintosh I can tell how much I missed out on. The compactness of the box and the human focus design (eg. handle is built-in) makes it a treasure even today.

The 2nd thing I would love to try is driving the monitor from something else, say an FPGA or a Raspberry Pi.

Switcher worked so amazingly well on the SE/30. That's what I remember most about this machine.

the SE/30 was my first mac, way back when i was a 7 year old. Crazy to think i've been a mac user for almost 30 years.

I had an SE/30, as a kid (and it was already old). I don't know if it was on that mac that I had a trial version of codewarrior as a compiler, or if that was a later one..

I bought an SE/30 off of ebay a while back. It came souped up with 20 megs of RAM and an ethernet card. Unfortunately, no drivers for the ethernet card were included. It took me a while to get the right ones for it (no docs for the ethernet, had to identify it based on the back of the card), but I did manage to get it online.

UND had a lab of Mac SE/30s hooked to a Laser Writer. I wrote every paper for college on those things in Mac Write. I loved those machines. It was amazing how nice that monitor and positioning was.

I sometimes dream of someone building one of those again with a monitor in portrait instead of the normal monitor position.

Ahh jeez, this is a good reminder for me to recap some of my old Macs... I have quite a few that still have the original capacitors and it's only a matter of time before one or more of them get damaged by leaky caps! Especially the trusty SE/30!

Still have my SE/30. Got it in the late 1990s at university surplus for $75 or so. Last time I fired it up was around 2016; still worked perfectly. Probably should try it out again soon.

Just looking at the screenshots makes me tear up a little. I loved my SE/30 and everything I could do on it. Wish I'd kept it.

Mother of god, this may be the single largest and slowest webpage I've ever downloaded.

50MB of images served over http/1.1...

On my phone it loads much faster than 90% of web pages.

OP went through a lot of trouble.

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