Macintosh SE/30

And another machine joins the 'collection'.

Before I talk about it, I need to make it clear that this wasn't an impulse purchase. If you were to research classic Macintoshes, particularly the compact form factor models, it becomes clear very quickly that the one to have is the SE/30. Before I found the LC475 by the side of the road that kick-started this whole hobby (some may say 'obsession'), I was casually looking for one, which got moved down in priority as I got other machines that required my attention (and more importantly, money).

So finally I got one, here's my Macintosh SE/30.

I should probably start by admitting that I probably overpaid a little for it. These aren't the most common machines in the UK, so when a decent one comes up for sale, the prices they go for tend to be higher than a normal SE or a Classic. The upside is that it has already been recapped, which saves me the hassle of doing it, and the motherboard hasn't been damaged by any capacitor or battery leakage. Plus it came with a mouse and keyboard, which is always nice to have.

The specs as I received it are as follows: Motorola 68030 processor (which gives it the "/30" part of it's name), 4MB RAM, 20MB hard disk, and the ubiquitous auto-eject floppy disk drive. Condition-wise, it's not exactly mint, the case plastics have yellowed with age, but I'm fine with that. The 9" monochrome CRT is beautifully sharp, and doesn't appear to have suffered with any burn-in or fading due to age or use.

I've actually had this machine for a couple of months, I wanted to do some (required) upgrades to it before I could put it into active use. Unfortunately the hard disk that was in it (which some investigation found was actually from an SE model) lasted about 20 minutes before it decided it wasn't going to be reliable any more. My next plan was to swap in the SCSI2SD that was previously installed in my LC475, but then I found that the v6 model of the SCSI2SD and the SE/30 don't really play nice. It worked for the most part, but would randomly give address errors when writing. I purchased a v5.1, which works absolutely fine. The final upgrade was to give it an extra 64MB of RAM, so I could effectively run whatever I wanted on it without resorting to virtual memory.

Now it's complete, I've installed 7.5.3 on it and hooked it up to my network using AppleTalk (there will be a separate blog post on this, it's pretty interesting), and plan to use it primarily for word processing, as it's just a joy to sit here and type into. Highly recommended.