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Comment by jonstewart | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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”.

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