My New Old Macintosh SE/30 Computer
charlieharrington.com
charlieharrington.com
There should be several levels of security toggles, from being able to install software from anywhere on the internet, all the way to disabling memory protection altogether. As long as the user completely understands each, I think we would be in a much better situation.
Ah, I could go on and on about cool stuff like that. Indeed, ResEdit was super awesome, and I learned soo much about how computers work because of it (also having been a young kid who wanted to learn). Great memories :)
I pirated a copy of REALBasic to make my first Mac program. I did, ironically pay for a book on how to program with it though.
I understand why compilers and IDEs cost money, but it seems obvious to me that they should be free and easy for everyone. I’m glad we live in this era.
I miss the Itchy and Scratchy screen saver for After Dark.
You started up System 7 at first and then clicked on the launcher and it would reboot into NetBSD. This was like 1.something ... might have been 1.5?
I had some external SCSI drives for it in the low GB range and I believe a CDRW. I think the ram was at 128MB (might have been 96)
I had compiled Mozilla 0.9 or so for it (whatever was current) and it actually ran (compiling took I think 4 days because I compiled it on the SE/30). You could see the elements of the interface render to the screen in human time.
I distinctly remember seeing each button come in to view and then slowly typed in "slashdot.org".
I used it as an X terminal as well, using the -broadcast option to log into an HP-UX 10.20 machine. I ran sam and CDE on that tiny monochrome screen. So ridiculous.
It was a glorious waste of time.
Just looked in my old email archives --- this was indeed from 2002. Right, 20 years it is then.
I put NetBSD on mine as well, and used it as a mail server for a time. With a little jiggery-pokery of a Wifi AP you could even be wireless.
Great machines.
I have NetBSD on a IIci (128MB RAM, SCSI drive, Farallon Ethernet NuBus card). I use it for netatalk, and as an internal DNS, DHCP and printer server. Other than requiring a motherboard recap, it performs very well in this capacity. It's not fast, and I gimped it further by pulling the cache card (a source of instability), but it doesn't need to be.
The reason I bought the SE/30 is because it's the computer I had on long term loan for my very first "paying" gig as developer, I was 17: making the software that drove the audio system for the Lille (FR) brand new metro lines back then.
Wrote the software in Turbo Pascal, to run on a smaller mac -- it had a GPIO card that drove 2 big REVOX tape reels, and was rewinding them in sequence while the other played elevator music. It also had a selector and an 'alarm' button to trigger digital announces from the control room, in case of problems on the metro line. The audio played on 10th's of stations, for years.
After a few mishaps (finding tapes torn to completely shreds in the computer room, because the 'beginning of tape' signal hadn't worked really well after rewinding!) it worked absolutely flawlessly until late 1999. I should have charged more :-)
It also had an easter egg! It was playing an 'happy birthday' message to myself every year, in every stations, early day on my birthday. Nobody ever complained :-)
I eventually returned the SE/30, and was given a PowerBook 140, which wasn't as fast, but hey, laptop baby, and, I still own that one!
When Steve Jobs saw the Xerox Alto, he thought "well, obviously all personal computers are going to be like this", which is pretty much how I felt upon encountering the Mac for the first time (not until 1990).
My opinions tend to be pretty weak these days (like a three-handed economist), but with a typical teenage passion, I could not understand why anyone would use Windows, or how Windows could even exist when the Mac was there.
When I finally got my own (i)Mac in 2000, it was no longer quite so perfect. Although, I think the OS X 10.3 - 10.5 era got close.
Replace Windows with Mac and Mac with Amiga and you’re in my teenage passion years!
Although I had the same feeling of “this is the future” when I saw a demonstration of the original Mac in 1984. But I just remember thinking, “no color?”
I think he was mostly trying to avoid comparisons to the 8 bit Apples.
The other reason being of course that VRAM was breathtakingly expensive at the time and you could save some money by going with 1 bit per pixel. All in all the Mac with its 512x342 monochrome display tended to come out looking nicer than the contemporary 320x200 16 color EGA graphics.
In case I missed something, I recently checked out a few web pages that captured images of the original Amiga "desktop" and it confirmed to me that the UI truly was, IMHO, rather poor.
That still is remarkable to me. Susan Kare deserves the accolades, but I'm surprised there no one on the Amiga team that could make as good a UI.
For that matter, the Raspbian OS I've been playing with on the Raspberry Pi has some pretty ugly stuff. Just to use an obvious example, is Thonny's icon for real?
I'll stop ranting about stuff I know nothing about now.
For me, while KDE 1 was OK, KDE 2, 3 and 4 got progressively uglier and uglier. Finally KDE 5 (call it "plasma" or whatever you like) went all flat and it's at least bearable to look at, although not pleasant.
GNOME 3, OTOH, while I've never liked it at all as a desktop, looks immaculate. I think this is largely credit to Jakub Steiner's work on its graphical design (https://jimmac.eu/). He is really good.
As far as the Amiga goes, yes, I agree. The weird colours of AmigaOS 1.x (blue, white, bright orange, black) were so that it would display with decent contrast on a TV set rather than a monitor – specifically, an analogue CRT TV using US NTSC modulation. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10
When the Amiga got a bit more mature and more people used monitors, AmigaOS 2.x got a slightly more toned-down blues-and-greys palette. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204
But to my eyes the design was always crude and blocky and not appealing, whereas classic MacOS always looked great, either in monochrome on a tiny screen, or greyscale on a medium-sized one, or thousands of colours on several huge screens.
Oh, come on:
- tiny screen
- one-button mouse
- little memory
- expense
- poor tools
- closed architecture
- yada yada
I remember when the Mac first came out, the guy in the next room had one. I asked him "How do I write some C code on this?" Blank looks.
Modern machines are incredible and do so much more but these were useful in their time.
There were other graphical desktops like Amiga and Atari ST around that time but nothing on either platforms had the finesse of the early Mac programs (as flawed as they could be).
My sense was the 128K Mac and 512 ("FatMac") were rather brief footnotes.
Still, college friend got a 128K Mac when they came out (Carnegie Mellon gave them to all the Freshmen?) and MacPaint + ImageWriter had us making our own cassette tape labels.
The first development tool I had access to was a port of UCSD Pascal. This was old school, original, UCSD Pascal v2. Simply imagine UCSD Pascal with a Quickdraw extension (that is if you can actually imagine UCSD Pascal at all...). I spent an entire evening making a button.
Next, we managed to get the next generation of UCSD. A much more "Mac native" dev environment, full access to the toolbox. We tried to build a sample program on a single drive machine. After about 30+ floppy swaps, the build failed. We didn't try it after that.
I don't know if I ever really got access to MS-BASIC. To be honest, at this point I was too busy having fun building Car Wars design spreadsheets in Multiplan -- which was AMAZING. If you weren't there, it's hard to imagine the impact of the mouse on a spreadsheet. It was cool enough in a word processor, but on a spreadsheet? Whoo boy.
In short order, I bumped the machine up to 512K in a back alley in Pasadena, and got my hands on a 400K external drive. Now, my friends, we're cooking with gas.
Indeed, Aztec C was the first compiler I bought. It provided a "unix like" dev environment with a unixy shell with an assortment of utilities, vi for the editor. It was completely competent for writing C on the Mac, you had full access to the toolbox. You need the 512K and external drive to pull it off, but it worked fine. Honestly, you needed that configuration for most anything. In those days, you rebooted -- a lot. (Programmers switch ftw!)
I had the "Phone Book" Inside Macintosh as a reference. Later we drove up to a computer show in San Francisco, and Addison-Wesley had just released the hard cover version. $80!! I still bought it (this was a lot of money for me). I also bought a very cool multi-tasking Forth, who's name escapes me.
Appreciate that C development on, well, any contemporary micro computer was a nightmare. Everything was slow, everything was small. Hard drives were rare. The Mac was no speed demon, but it was faster than a PC. It was faster than a Z80. Most anyone doing any real work for any of these machines, was doing it on something else. I think Microsoft did everything on VAXes (obviously not everything, but core development).
I got the Apple Smalltalk in late '85. This was THE Smalltalk. Blue book Smalltalk. The Xerox image on an Apple VM. This is where Squeak came from. But it wasn't very usable on a 512K machine.
Think Pascal was the real game changer. A full boat "IDE" self hosted on the Mac. This was, effectively, the "Turbo Pascal" of the Macintosh. It was dreamy. The Interwebz says it came out in '86.
Nobody I knew was using the Lisa. Nobody had access to one. We were all Mac geeks, making do. It's hard to imagine doing anything with a 9" screen, but we did. Just adapted. Wrote code on it, wrote (and laid out) the user group newsletter on it. I did database work on a Mac Plus, using 4th Dimension. Made some very nice reports for a survey system.
Bonus of a 9" screen? We all took our Macs with us. We all had those padded Mac bags. I bungied mine to the back of my scooter. When our user group met in a pizza joint, it was invaded with Macs, and we still had room for the pizza. Oh, and can you say...AppleTalk?
https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-part-6-look-and...
The first question out of a knowledgeable user's mouth would not have been "Can I write C on it?" You would rightly have deserved hostile stares rather than blank looks.
I still enjoy writing small amusing applications and games.
When I got a Mac Plus and figured out how to draw sprites, I recalled that little Commodore exploration I had done years earlier.
I get that it's not great for everything we do today that requires acres of screen real estate, but if you want to concentrate on a single task like writing (or programming) with little distraction, it's really nice.
The Mac became more open than the iPhone ever did - then started getting closed down more and more again - but they were both basically perfect MVP/proof of concept launches for a basic form factor and interface that got extended over the years to do so much more.
a good idea in theory until you see that the original Lisa sold for what would be the inflation-adjusted price of $24,000 USD today.
Rob Mitchelmore wrote the Force32 extension which is made for Macs without a PRAM battery. It makes sure 32-bit addressing is enabled during startup. (Note that since a restart is required after enabling 32-bit addressing, it will automatically restart during the first cold boot).
How that list failed to include the "Jurassic Park" computer, the gorgeous Quadra 700, truly made me sad. It's a machine where, if you need to take it apart, you can remove every single component - even the PSU and motherboard - with only ever needing to remove a single screw. (You can even remove the PSU's fan w/o needing any tools.) The rest is so beautifully designed that you can pop release all of it: floppy drive, hard drive PSU, speaker, motherboard, etc.
The 1 single screw holds the drive caddy to the case. That's it. And it's a design strategy that I'm willing to bet at least 50% of Quadra 700 owners back in the day didn't even realize was sitting on their desks.
By the way, the mini-desktop machine could be stood vertically or laid on its side - it was up to the user. Simply breathtakingly incredible design.
I was just opining about an anecdotal personal fave. :)
I recently bought four of these for use with various SGI and ran into a minor difficulty and the maker of these devices went well beyond the call of duty to assist me and provide suggestions, etc.
On a Saturday.
In the UK.
Most of us in my class didn't know where Oregon is, really did not care about a story of woefully unprepared people who chose to make a journey for reasons of absolutely no consequence to a British nine year old, and to this day likely bear a grudge against an entire US state.
I got into an awful lot of trouble for submitting the minimum possible homework on that. Other kids: fifteen pages of detailed drawings and stories. Me: two A5 sides of completely disinterested made-up diary.
It was my only real rebellion.
> In the UK.
You may be misrembering - a Mac would be very rare in a UK school - it was probably an Apple II.
It absolutely wouldn't have been an Apple II; I never saw an Apple II in the UK until they were retro. It would have been a port to the (similarly 6502-based) BBC Model B. We had loads of those in schools [0].
A bit of a google suggests that it was likely based on code from a 1978 computer listing, though it would have been 1983 when it was inflicted on us.
Funnily enough I don't think we spent more than half an hour with the computer. A week or so with the assignment.
[0] the Apple II would have been more expensive, and didn't provide the opportunity for schools-television-related content or a loan of the county's (truly groundbreaking) Domesday Book laser disk system:
https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co83846...
True, but this is a post about Macs - see title.
All I really remember is a shufflepuck game. That's it.
Just to confuse things, this would have been about 1995. That awkward gap between the beebs, and Tesco taking an interest in the matter.
Getting even more off-topic, but I remember being a kid/teen in 1980s/90s Australia, and the diversity of machines we got to use at school impresses me in hindsight: Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, classic Macs, Acorn Archimedes, IBM PC JXs running DOS, Atari STs, no-name IBM PC compatibles running Windows 3.x/9x and Netware. (Not all at the same school, that was across four different schools I attended K-12.) My own kids don’t get exposed to anywhere near as much technological variety.
Nah. they lookd like what they were, clunky bent-steel boxes.
I agree the Nimbus was a dead-end.
It was a break from school where we got to play video games.
/me adds unfocussed_mike to terrorist watch list
I also picked up my old 512k "Fat" Mac from my aunt's house where I had it stored for 20 years. Powered it up. Bright white screen, perfectly sharp, works perfectly. Not bad for a machine that debuted in 1984.
I've got one that I've wondered might be a good connected-but-not-TOO-connected device.
It's a great conversation piece, too.
A far less expensive option is to get a Pi Zero, a USB-to-serial adapter, and a Apple-to-9-pin null modem cable. You can set up SLIRP on the pi running linux and then use a PPP modem driver to connect to the internet on the se/30. You're stuck at serial port speeds, but honestly for most of what you want to do on a computer this old (irc, bbsing, file transfers of se/30 sized files) it's actually pretty solid. I use the pi zero / serial interface for a bunch of my old computers that don't have proper network adapters.
I still have my SE/30. Need to replace some caps and boot it...
Shortly thereafter I got my own Macintosh Classic with 4mb RAM and 40 MB hard disk.
Also if you like this stuff there's popular channels out there like Adrian's Digital basement or 8bit guy, etc...
Side note: the movie Jobs (2013) was dramatized and all that but it had a cool scene, when those circuits drew something on a screen. I am aware of Xerox Alto and all that. But still the concept of making something so new... idk that's cool would like to be part of that. Also those chips seem more tangible than an i7 or something. You could almost mentally map which chip goes to what part of the screen.
I will say I'm past it though, I don't really covet old tech just because of performance. I do to some degree like old Chromebooks using Linux.
Still a marvellous memory!
[my father brought one day a CD300. It was supposed to be a revolution. Well ok, I used it to listen to Pink Floyd CDs while playing King Quest ;)]
When a leak happens, even if you can fix/replace the components mounted to the boards, when you've got multi-layer boards it gets hard to figure out how repair the damage that happened to the internal traces and such.
If possible, replacing those batteries with something less likely to juice all over is what you want to do. And since you don't really know when it will start to leak, getting those old batteries out NOW is the safest option.
People recommend to remove them altogether though, I guess they figure the machines will be sitting in a closet for another 15 years, best to remove the problem altogether.
This is the reason.
At the repair shop where I've worked we do recycling, and there's a lot of electronics that get destroyed by leaky batteries.
If you can do it without voiding warranty (and sometimes even if you do void the warranty), always take the batteries out of electronics when they go into storage.
This read more like "my gran says to always unplug the toaster else the house will surely burn down"
OTOH, who’d imagine back then we’d still be using and cherishing these little machines?
Sadly, I didn't actually get a Mac for another 10 years, but the SE/30 lives on in my head. Had I extravagant amounts of free space in my office, I'd track one down to run as a hobby.
QuickBASIC: https://winworldpc.com/product/quickbasic/10x-for-mac
Logo, Smalltalk, Forth, ABC, Lisp, and others: https://www.gryphel.com/c/sw/program/index.html
128MB of RAM would have been insanely spendy in 1989. Somewhere around $30k modern eqv.
So the total equivalent cost would be as much as a higher spec Mac Pro.
I’m pretty sure those were unavailable at that time for any amount of money.
Oh, but...YES! The memories! chef's kiss