Oh the memories! There was a plastic thingy that clipped onto to the case and stuck through to push the two "programmers" buttons on the board. I remember them being a hard reset and an interrupt button. Very handy while programming. At least if you programmed like I did. I had one of these in college. I added a board that upgraded it to 16MB(?) and attached a "two page" black and white monitor. I wrote my thesis in MacWrite on it. Thanks for a good tear down and some memories.
Oh also, I don't know if anyone has mentioned, but those two tactile switches on the motherboard are a reset switch and a non maskable interrupt switch, aka the "programmer's button." Pressing it brings up a little debugger window, which could be replaced by a program called "macsbug" to give you some powerful debugging tools. If you needed to use those buttons often, you could get a small plastic widget that fit onto the side of the case and reached through the vents to actuate those buttons.
From the days when Macs were built up to the best possible quality rather than down to a planned obsolescent price. The next model after this one - the SE30 4/40 - was my first experience with a Mac. Lovely machine. Hell on wheels fast for the time. The SE30 was the fastest compact Mac ever produced. After that Apple went into reverse and weirdly produced a slower colour version, the Colour Classic. 26:15 "System ROM sis 6.0.8" - er no that;s the version of the Installed Macintosh system software on the hard drive, nothing to do with the boot ROM. Good old system six. the operating system that only allowed you to run one program at a time. To launch Word - installed on this machine - you had to quit out of the Finder. To use both at the same time you had to enable a special feature ( an official Apple hack) called Multifinder, then restart - which used up valuable RAM which could otherwise be assigned to your program. When you only had 2Mb to play with, every kilobyte counted.
I've got a couple vintage computers that I still play on. One of them is as old as I am (1987), and still works, with the exception of the RTC chip (Phillips used to make 24 pin packages that would plug in under the BIOS, with the BIOS piggybacking into that). The battery on that chip JUST RECENTLY crapped out. Had to dremel into the chip to cut the connections to the two button-cell batteries, and bodge some wires to connect another battery. It works again :D
I still spin my 512K up occasionally to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego on it. Also tried using a Power Mac running OS 9 as a Python development environment with IRC communication for a while recently, and again, worked perfectly fine. BBEdit on that was like a long-lost friend rejoining the party.
Hi Dave, the buttons you found is actually a programmer's key, or interrupt button an a reset button! For debugging purposes only, they are reachable from the outside using the programmer's switch.
I still have a specially modified Torx driver in my tool drawer just for vintage Macs: about 20 years ago I cut a regular Torx driver in half and welded a little extension in the middle to make it easy to reach those screws inside the handle.
The reset and interrupt switches were on the side -- you snapped a plastic assembly onto the cooling slots on the side which enabled pressing the buttons through the case. The interrupt button launched the built-in disassembler by default ( gave a ">" prompt in a dialog window) but you could install other alternative debug tools as well.
The two tactile switches are the reset and debug buttons. There's a special "programmer's switch" which is a piece of plastic that protrudes through the vents in the side of the case that allows programmers to use them. Theyre used to break into the debugger and reset the 68K.
Yeah, the "20SC" in these old SEs is a MiniScribe 8425SA, made especially for Apple. The 8425 it's based on is an MFM drive, and so it's good for *maybe* 400 kB/s if you're lucky. One of the neat things about this is that it had timer auto-park...if you let it idle long enough, it'd park the heads by itself. Someone further down had mentioned Rodime, and no, they didn't use those here, but Apple did use a Rodime with an odd proprietary interface in the old HD20 external drive (which attached to the floppy port and was very slow, as I understand it).
THANKS DAVE. Being a vintage computer enthusiast I always enjoy a good teardown like this. In fact, I first found EEVblog 3 years ago when I stumbled on your Tandy 1000 teardown. All the best..
A few details from an old-skool Mac-head (now reformed; I use Ubuntu). The keyboard reset switch had no function on the SE series but was used as a power switch on the Mac II series which had software-controlled latching power supplies. It took advantage of a spare pin in the ADB cables. Interesting note: you could use an S-video cable as a really long ADB cable if you needed. The expansion slot was called NuBus. Adding the card did not require the user to get near the CRT as it fed through the horizontal slot in back. I never saw an SE series machine with a card, but NuBus cards were common in Mac II series machines. I used a Mac IIfx for a few years: its ADB controller chips were in fact two 6502 CPUs! I decided that IIfx meant "II f-ing expensive." It cost $20,000 new with 4MB RAM and an 80MB SCSI hard disk, and a 50MHz 68030 CPU! The two mystery buttons on the side of the mobo are the "programmer's switch". The front one (if memory serves) was a reset button and the other one issued an interrupt so developers could call up a debugger.
+Murray Pearson If you call ubuntu reformed then you are sadly mistaken. Please follow these steps to be reformed. 1. Look at yourself in the mirror for 4 hours. If you can resist the urge to immediately smash your head into the adjacent wall, you are already 50% done. 2. Stop using ubuntu and use something called getting a life. It's simple. Just unplug (Or don't) everything electronic, pick it up, and chuck it in the nearest bin. 3. Go out, get drunk, and wake up 3 days later with no idea what happened underneath a bridge in southern texas.
Those circuit lines on the PCB are just beautiful. All parallel in mostly one direction, just so cool! Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't feel like modern boards have quite that beautiful style.
Yes, it's annoying enough difference when I turn my head. Not trivial to fix in post production, just adds annoying extra steps, so mostly I let it fly.
That handle was genuinely useful, and it really was a portable machine. I used to take my SE30 from work to home every night. Just a few cables, keyboard, mouse, voila.
Johnno9999 And people do not even know how to use a slate-board anymore. Nor a fountain pen. If you were stuck on some deserted island with no modern technology for many decades, you would be doing good, just to build just 1 transistor and to find some way to power it.
***** What do you do after you have predictably found food? Spend the next several months trying to make enough rope to make a rescue raft to get off the island? As the star character in the movie "Castaway" did? It is really hard work to make rope, when you don't have some handy factory machine to do it for you.
***** Where would you get enough hair? Certainly not from your head. No, you need to process quite a lot of plant stems to get your rope. Do you have any idea of the huge amount of rope needed to lash together a raft? And even such a raft, is hardly sea-worthy. Now if you just had some petroleum, and an oil refinery, and you could make nylon, and then you make a machine to wind all the strands. But how are you going to do all that, on some deserted island? According to "Castaway", it literally took him months, and he was trying to get his raft ready, in time for the seasonal shipping currents or something. How else could he get off the island and back to civilization? It is not like in some silly video game, in which what you need, is neatly positioned nearby, just sitting on a desk or inside of a smash-able crate.
And a bunch of other computers of the generation, from Sun workstations to the Sega Genesis, it even appears in the TI-89 graphing calculator and versions of it are still used in embedded systems. Not bad for a chip that came out in 1979.
i was supposed to finish some smd soldering... but AGAIN, i´m sitting here with a pizza, watching your teardown. sometimes your videos give me the same feeling like taking something apart myself :)
Apple has always been known for their handles on their computers. But even today: The "old" Mac Pro and the "new" Mac Pro have handles, I really appreciate handles and always did so!
The expansion slot in these things was the same form factor as the NuBus, continued to be used in 90s macs. I have a rescued SE/30 with a whopping 10 meg ethernet card in it. Actually managed to get it onto the internet with a 10base2 to 10baseT converter! The machine's SCSI drive had died, and some of the 30-pin RAM SIMMS were bad, so I resurrected it with parts stolen from a 386. It now has a 200 MB hard drive and about 32 MB of RAM. wonder how much that would have sold for back in the 80s if such a thing had existed? :-)
you should overclock it, put 8 gigs of ram in the expansion slot, give it water cooling, replace the floppy disk with a solid state hard drive, rewrite the OS a little so it is capable of color, remove the CRT and replace it with a color LCD, replace the old keyboard ports with USB, and get all the yellow stuff off it (or at least make it all one color) then you install a bunch of games, turn it into a battery powered portable and then your done XD
Hey Dave - Glanced through the comments and didn't see it mentioned, but that handle/bracket which was blocking your hand getting to the power connector looked like was removable with two screws, letting you get in much closer. As for the custom plate, back in graduate school, it was common to add a custom mount to devices that were parked in spaces where they didn't have a stable foot print, esp. if they were over expensive equipment. That tape could be vibration dampening (since aged).
The VLSI chip is the IWM or Integrated Woz Machine. It's a functional equivalent of the original Apple II disk controller card designed by Steve Wozniak, with enhancements to support the Sony 3.5 inch drives. The switches were the Reset and the Programmer's Switch (a manual interrupt basically). There was an external plastic snap-on piece with levers which pressed the actual switches on the board inside the case.
At least as far as the original B&W Macs go, the SE/30 was a beast. It was as fast or, in some configurations, faster than the top-of-the-line Mac II and, although the SE/30 wasn't cheap, it cost a whole lot less than a Mac II. There was one equipped with a 24 bit color graphics card in service in my high school into at least the mid 90s.
Dave, I'm sure you've figured it out but that isn't the original keyboard. Also, the two tactile switches on the board are for reset and interrupt. There's normally a button panel that snaps onto the side of the machine with fingers that reach through the slots in the case to push them.
Ah I just love these videos in spite of my limited knowledge of electronics engineering. It's the enthusiasm and general likeability of our australian friend :P
I used a lot of these in high school. I got a kick out of the technology back then. We had a whole room full of these on a LAN, sharing a single Laserwriter printer. Only wish they had color screens!
This brings back memories... Thanks so much... And reading the other comments about debugging - I'd forgotten about the "Even Better Mr Bus Error" extention... :) Those were the days..
All apple keyboards from the Apple II up to and into the USB era had a "Reset" key which was initially tied to an interrupt and used to break into the debugger. It was used by consumers to reset the computer as well (Ctrl+Command+Reset) and once soft power on became big, it was used as the power button up until the iMac when it was changed to the power key and bore the standard power symbol.
Interesting video! Little tip for the screen flicker, if you turn your shutter speed down (probably as low as it'll go- 1/30 of a second or so) it will help get rid of the flicker. As well, I had a bit of a giggle at 30:04 when you said circuit simulator lol
One thing I believe should have been mentioned, that the difference in the modem-port and the printer-port were only in the nomenclature. When you added any device to one of those two ports, you had to tell the computer into which port you plugged them in to. Usually you saw the same symbols on the software side as you saw on the back of the computer. I've been asked one too many times, why you couldn't connect a modem to the printer-port, yet YOU CAN ! Also, you could connect a printer to the modem-port, they are both exactly the same !
There is one key difference, particularly in older macs. That is that only the Printer port could be used for Localtalk networking. If you tried to connect to a Localtalk network with the modem port, it wouldn't work. Some of the later Old-World PowerMacs could use either port, but all of the 68k-based Macs could not. In fact, if you turned Appletalk on with any Mac that didn't have some kind of Ethernet port (either built-in or on an expansion card), it would disconnect any device you had configured for the printer port. As for other devices, yes, you could use them in either port, be they modems, printers, or anything else the serial ports could connect to.
Without the multifinder enabled and screensaver installed (as well as other addons), the system and finder take up less memory. I remember I had to upgrade to a minimum of 2MB on my SE in order to run the After Dark Star Trek edition screensaver.
On Macintosh computers in the 90s the button behind the main keyboard was the power on button, you'd press it to turn the computer on, but of course the SE has a physical power switch on it. You could keep the SE and use it for basic word processing tasks where you don't need to E-mail documents to people, or you could scour the Internet for games then when your son's a bit older he could play some basic games on it.
yep, we had when I was in elementary school, the computer is placed on a spacial cage that covers the sides and top pf the computer, then the screw bolts things screw into it through the main cage, then that cake is bolted to the table. (those computers were built really tough (handled quite a few textbooks being thrown at them :) )
The switches are NMI and reset - a plastic panel to use them was either around $5 or came with most programming languages. All the things in the Apple menu are added to the system, as well as the icons that show up on the bottom. It will run much faster if you clean them up. It makes the system several times bigger and slower. People where just as bad then about bogging their system down with silly add-ons. HyperCard is probably on there, and is a really awesome and useful programme.
an unbelievably beautiful example of well engineered hardware. ram expansion slots, onboard scsi and a hi-res display....the first time I saw the Mac se in action, I remember feeling guilty for wishing that I owned one, instead of my trusty six month old Amiga 500. I noticed that the varta battery hadn't leaked, which isn't bad for a 28-year-old machine. the same type of varta battery (and the same year too) was installed in my (now fully restored) amiga a2000, where the 'kin thing had leaked and 'ate' a hole; the size if a blue whale's sphincter, right through the mainboard. 'Jerry built' was obviously a redundant complement to 'west germany' - even back in '88. ;) ref: "what to do with apple?" clean her up, Dave, and place her in your computer museum - next to the others. amiga, apple, acorn (archimedes), atari - the four A's of legend. best 'geek porn' ever....that is, if there is such a thing? maybe that's an 'exploitable' market niche for those entrepreneurs amongst us..... thanks for posting mate! quality and entertaining content as always.
About that stuck on plate on the bottom: The feet look like they would slot into some sort of mount, like to make sure you couldn't pick it up, or if it were on some sort of stand or something, it couldn't tip over.
They had one of these setup as a server in the computer lab at my elementary school when I was young... At the time it was very powerful compared to the other systems hooked up to it, mainly Apple IIGS. Definitely the good old days..
That metal plate on the bottom is a more secure option for mounting in things like computer labs. Those feet fit into locking rails on the table, so the thing can't be picked up at all
DIP packs are usually just resistors going cross the package, eg pin 1 to pin max. Occasionally it is useful that all the resistors are on the same thick film and much closer to each other than to the nominal value, eg. resistor ladders in ADC circuits.
Also the two buttons on the board. On the back of the original Mac was a reset button and an interrupt button. Interrupt I think crashed the OS to a stack dump screen or something similar (been many many years since I remember pressing that button)
Worked on the Mac SE/30 back in the early 90s. The trick to taking the case off is to place your hands on the sides and yank it back. Next step was to remove the CRT yoke plate to protect the CRT. A common problem was that the hard drive would get stuck in the park position. This was easily cured by giving the right side of the unit a good slap with the hand, at the height of the floppy drive, and the system would boot up.
Dave, see if you can get your hands on a NeXT computer (no idea how easy that'll be Down Under - or anywhere, really). NeXT were really proud of their hardware and manufacturing (here's their detailed presentation of the motherboard production: watch?v=sT6aphdX0rI ). It's basically the exact same processes as today - just 25 years ago! For the uninformed: NeXT was Steve Jobs's 2nd computer company after he got fired from Apple in 1985. They built advanced high-end UNIX-based workstations, and their OS is the basis for current day Mac OS X. An expensive niche computer to be sure, but lots of advanced stuff in there with tons of impact on current tech (not just Macs). Noteworthy: Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT machine to create the World Wide Web. So yeah, big tip of the hat to NeXT!
The hard drive is a Miniscribe model 8425 (which also existed with the ST506/MFM interface), with stepper motor head actuator. It was a very common drive back in the days and quite a big number of these arrived at today still working or at least in a restorable state. I suggest to desolder the old battery as a lot of them were prone to literally explode and spill acid all over the mainboard and even on the chassis! I saw some months ago a Mac SE/30 with what were the remainings of a Maxell battery, which exploded and its acids corroded badly the mainboard and even the metallic chassis over it until the point it became rusty! Do it as soon as you can to prevent this disaster, I personally put away all the batteries in my old Macs.
The drawing speeds you see towards the end of the video are faster than most of the Windows Vista machines had and are still faster than on many modern (underpowered) Windows systems...
+Rafael Santana I am not an Apple fan at all, but it is true that old Systems often ran faster, although they where less powerful, because the old Software was not so much blaoted. Thiys is not only true for apple, also for old PCs. And yes, many machines with Vista where underpowered at the time Vista was released, but only because the System requirements of Vista where too heavy for that time, it was impossible to build a PC that runs Vista fast enough for the average selling Price of a PC (Although I don't think that they had 256MB-machines with Vista, because you cannot run Vista with 256MB without heavy modifications). And the main reaon why Vista needed so powerful PCs was unneccessary Software bloat and eye-candy.
Wow! Great tear-down, thank you! If you want to transform it, it's a fun project to toss in a mini-atx form factor mobo, and replace everything to modern parts, so it looks retro but is actually all modern. Then put an emulator on it. Or altogether different is to tear down a netbook and toss it into there, seeing how the boards are integrated already. Another way to go is to use a raspberry pi.
Others have probably made this point in the past, but the button on the top of the keyboard was generally used as a power button for Macs that supported soft power-on. That's why it's set apart from the other keys.
+Shmeh Fleh And that is also why they removed it. Just hitting it accidentally would turn off your macintosh runining all your progress. It's happened to me before, and on other windows keyboards too. It's just a stupid thing to have. Seriously are people too lazy to turn shit on?
No, it's not a power switch, it's a soft power switch. So if you hit it during the machine is power on, you will see a dialog if you want to shut the machine of.
I've got a couple vintage computers that I still play on. One of them, a Tandy 1000HX is as old as I am (1987), and still works, with the exception of the RTC chip. Phillips used to make 24 pin packages that would plug in under the BIOS, with the BIOS piggybacking into that, since RTC clocks weren't really a standard feature on PCs at the time, and that's what this machine has. The battery on that chip JUST RECENTLY crapped out after 30 years, and they're rated to last for 10! That's a NASA warranty for you there! Had to dremel into the chip to cut the connections to the two button-cell batteries, and bodge some wires to connect another battery. It works again :D I'm no Apple fanboi either, but I still find the vintage Macs fascinating.
More fun: Check out Microchip AN591, it's an application note on talking the ADB protocol with PICs! It's for client side communication only, but still very cool.
Enjoyed that. I gutted one of these a couple years ago (it was dead already, I promise) and I stuck an LCD in it, and some hard drives, and a mac mini, and turned it into my media hub :)
0.0078 gigahertz processor. Once upon a time, it was theorised that they couldn't make a processor faster than 500 Mhz. You had to enable big drive support on Widows 95 for hard drives larger than 512 megabytes.
Tactile switches are reset and interrupt. An accessory called the "programmer's switch" could be snapped to the side to allow easy access to these switches.
pocoapoco2 The interrupt switch can even get you out of a serious jam. If the program crashes with a "bomb", and the only choice given is to restart, hit the interrupt button. A command prompt will appear; type in G FINDER and press return. If the OS data in RAM is not corrupt, this will dump you to the Finder and possibly allow you to save some of your work. I don't miss cooperative multitasking!
I still have the switch connected on my old Mac. It's a piece of plastic the has fins that fit through the case and hit the two buttons as mentioned for reset and interrupt. Super helpful when debugging code.
I guess I was very privalaged in 1988 when my dad got a Commodore Amiga 2000. Comparatively it was years ahead of Apple and had a much more graphic GUI as well (Amiga Woekbench). I used the Amiga for at least 10 years. Only when Nvidia came out with their TNT chip and Creative released the Soundblaster Live! soundcard the Amiga became properly old. But that is 10 years later... a striking long useful life for a computer.
Years ahead of Apple? Perhaps ahead of the Mac SE, but the Mac II came out at the same time as the Amiga 2000, featuring the 68020 at 16 MHz vs the 68000 at 8 MHz in the Amiga 2000. Graphics were 640x480x8 vs 640x256x12 in the Amiga. What's a "much more graphic GUI" ? I think you don't know what you are talking about.
Looking at this makes you appreciate just how far ahead Commodore were with their Amiga machines. They had a proper pre-emptive multitasking full colour operating system back then!
Except the Amiga was already behind Apple at this point. This was the SE, meant to be Apple’s cheaper offering. It was released at the exact same time as the Macintosh II (March 87). The Mac II supported full colour, NuBus expansion slots, multiple monitors, a 68020 + FPU. The Amiga didn’t even get a 68020 until a year later.
19:30 the buttons are not named A & B - the letters are for finding component locations referring to schematics and/or board layout. The board layout on the hard disk screams Seagate :D
The buttons are cumulatively called the "programmer's switch", and it was accessed through a snap-in button set that poked through the ventilation slots. One of them was the Reset button (does what you expect) and one was the Interrupt button, which triggered the debugger.
Two tactile switches: Back in the day, a software developer would install an Apple-supplied 2-button plastic switch which reached down to the switched on the motherboard. One button allowed you to drop into a 68k debugger (so you could see where you were in a hung program). The other button forced a system reboot without needed to cycle the power.
Thats right! One was called the "programmer's switch" which put you in a debug mode when your program crashed, which a lot of software did back in the day. I had a Mac Classic running Master Tracs Pro to control my midi keyboards. Those were the days!
I don't know how the TH-cam live show thing works, but is there a sections where viewers can type messages to you? If yes, then perhaps parse out that text and send it to a homebrew TTS circuit :D
Whoa, an uncle of mine probably had one of these till somewhere around 1998. I was always amazed about how it could tell you that it was starting up with the desktop basically already there, while my 486 was telling me that Windows was loading. By the way, for some reason I got some serious ASMR when he was slowly turning the thing around...
The plate on the bottom is an anti-theft plate. They were commonly used in libraries and schools and such. The tool that is used to open the MacSE (and other similarly cased Mac's) was the 'Mac Crack Tool'. It was nothing special, just a long handled torx driver. The rest key on the keyboard was used to reset the computer itself, not just the bus. (Similar to a Control-Alt-Delete, Control, Open-Apple, Reset).
Someone probably already mentioned this, but what the heck.... The Apple Keyboard II is not the keyboard that came with the Macintosh SE. The SE had a different model - very similar in size and functionality to the one in the tear-down. The mouse is also not the original; the one that came with the SE had a white ball which was much bigger and heavier than the black ball. It is quite common for parts to get mixed up over the years on vintage computers.
We were still using these for admin staff in 1995 - they were durable units. but a lot of them hit the dumpster when pan and tilt VDUs were made mandatory in the UK. There was an aftermarket mod that pan & tilted the whole unit which might be what that metal plate on the base was to do with. By the time I left they had ethernet cards and a web browser NCSA mosaic on them so they straddle an era when Germany was divided into east and west to the start of the web era. Don't think you mentioned it but there's no eject button for the 3.5" floppy, disk writes were heavily buffered and you were supposed to eject in software (by dragging the floppy icon into the dustbin) If it crashed with a floppy stuck in there you had to poke a paperclip through the pinhole next to the drive to manually eject. I've had these open but never saw the stamped in signatures before - seems like a typical wanky apple thing to do, this was supposed to be affordable model and they're basically sticking the cost of an unneccesary extra manufacturing process on the customer for vanity (could have had it moulded into the inside of the plastic shell for nothing)
re: the reset button.. It's just a power button (nothing really special about it), but because the old macintoshes didn't have soft power to keep the RTC or anything else (like an ADB controller) running when the computer was off, they needed a separate line for the power switch. That's why it's not hooked up to the controller chip. Also worth noting... that keyboard is newer than this computer; the power button actually doesn't do anything for the SE. It'll work on a Classic II, though!
I think the bottom plate has been put on to help mount the machine in some kind of portable arrangement (Rack case etc) - i have seen these machines being used in live performance as MIDI interface controllers.
Close (and it probably could also be used as you described, even if that wasn't the main intent). It is the top half of a 3rd-party security plate. That, and the software install, indicate this machine was originally from a student computer lab at a university or college. The glued-on plate locks into a plate similarly glued/bolted to the desk. I have encountered similar (different manufacturer and slightly different design, but very similar) plats on machines purchased ex-labs from my local university back in the day.
I had a Mac IIci back in the early '90s. It was made to open up easily for adding expansion cards. The motherboard design was quite clean from what I recall. Running System 7, it could play small Quicktime videos, which I thought was pretty amazing back in the day.
The first PC I used. I was on a flight test at Pt Mugu, and writing reports of the flights for GE. We were flying F14s at each other to test an airborne infrared detection system. I flew out to Eglin AFB where we had another flight test going to visit and learn from my boss how to use the Mac (we used VAX systems back at the plant). He said "I'm going golfing - you'll figure it out ." Sure enough, darned easy to use.
Boots faster than a lot of new windows machines. LOL I personallly didnt think it was that slow. When you consider what it was doing and that it is running at 7mHz. It's actually pretty amazing... They were amazing.. It's why they sold so many of them. How many new computers will still work in 27 years....LOL... Not many. They did build good hardware. Surprized that battery had not gone bad. Maybe it was replaced at some point. Be interesting to see if they came with the battery made in Germany.
+Fascinated Heavy I was working with computers before this Mac was built.. so yes... and maybe you misunderstood. I said it was amazing it ran so well in that hardware considering the speed... I've got an i5 workstation that doesn't boot much faster. my point was that machine was amazing for its time.
+Markus Biörck I have done that, with virtualization. You type "win" at the DOS prompt, and you are instantaneously at Program Manager with zero perceptible delay, because the entire OS easily fits in the disk cache, and the entire OS also fits inside the CPU. No need for accessing the sticks of ram, whole OS runs in L3 cache.
Commodore proudly named its chips (MOS xxxxx) because they made them. MOS Tech wasn't marketing at all, it was a real IC maker and CBM had real logic designers.
No speech chip needed! It can be synthesized by the main CPU through software: Search for "MacInTalk 2". It's an add on to the system software, released by Apple.
I haven't heard those sounds in over 20 years. Sent a shiver down my spine.
Oh the memories!
There was a plastic thingy that clipped onto to the case and stuck through to push the two "programmers" buttons on the board. I remember them being a hard reset and an interrupt button. Very handy while programming. At least if you programmed like I did.
I had one of these in college. I added a board that upgraded it to 16MB(?) and attached a "two page" black and white monitor. I wrote my thesis in MacWrite on it.
Thanks for a good tear down and some memories.
Oh also, I don't know if anyone has mentioned, but those two tactile switches on the motherboard are a reset switch and a non maskable interrupt switch, aka the "programmer's button." Pressing it brings up a little debugger window, which could be replaced by a program called "macsbug" to give you some powerful debugging tools. If you needed to use those buttons often, you could get a small plastic widget that fit onto the side of the case and reached through the vents to actuate those buttons.
It amazes me that these still work, booting just like the did over two decades ago.
From the days when Macs were built up to the best possible quality rather than down to a planned obsolescent price. The next model after this one - the SE30 4/40 - was my first experience with a Mac. Lovely machine. Hell on wheels fast for the time. The SE30 was the fastest compact Mac ever produced. After that Apple went into reverse and weirdly produced a slower colour version, the Colour Classic.
26:15 "System ROM sis 6.0.8" - er no that;s the version of the Installed Macintosh system software on the hard drive, nothing to do with the boot ROM. Good old system six. the operating system that only allowed you to run one program at a time. To launch Word - installed on this machine - you had to quit out of the Finder. To use both at the same time you had to enable a special feature ( an official Apple hack) called Multifinder, then restart - which used up valuable RAM which could otherwise be assigned to your program. When you only had 2Mb to play with, every kilobyte counted.
I've got a couple vintage computers that I still play on. One of them is as old as I am (1987), and still works, with the exception of the RTC chip (Phillips used to make 24 pin packages that would plug in under the BIOS, with the BIOS piggybacking into that). The battery on that chip JUST RECENTLY crapped out. Had to dremel into the chip to cut the connections to the two button-cell batteries, and bodge some wires to connect another battery. It works again :D
I still spin my 512K up occasionally to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego on it. Also tried using a Power Mac running OS 9 as a Python development environment with IRC communication for a while recently, and again, worked perfectly fine.
BBEdit on that was like a long-lost friend rejoining the party.
Hi Dave, the buttons you found is actually a programmer's key, or interrupt button an a reset button! For debugging purposes only, they are reachable from the outside using the programmer's switch.
I still have a specially modified Torx driver in my tool drawer just for vintage Macs: about 20 years ago I cut a regular Torx driver in half and welded a little extension in the middle to make it easy to reach those screws inside the handle.
The reset and interrupt switches were on the side -- you snapped a plastic assembly onto the cooling slots on the side which enabled pressing the buttons through the case.
The interrupt button launched the built-in disassembler by default ( gave a ">" prompt in a dialog window) but you could install other alternative debug tools as well.
The two tactile switches are the reset and debug buttons. There's a special "programmer's switch" which is a piece of plastic that protrudes through the vents in the side of the case that allows programmers to use them. Theyre used to break into the debugger and reset the 68K.
This is what I love about my audience, someone ALWAYS knows!
Yeah, the "20SC" in these old SEs is a MiniScribe 8425SA, made especially for Apple. The 8425 it's based on is an MFM drive, and so it's good for *maybe* 400 kB/s if you're lucky. One of the neat things about this is that it had timer auto-park...if you let it idle long enough, it'd park the heads by itself.
Someone further down had mentioned Rodime, and no, they didn't use those here, but Apple did use a Rodime with an odd proprietary interface in the old HD20 external drive (which attached to the floppy port and was very slow, as I understand it).
THANKS DAVE. Being a vintage computer enthusiast I always enjoy a good teardown like this. In fact, I first found EEVblog 3 years ago when I stumbled on your Tandy 1000 teardown. All the best..
Torx was quite rare back then I believe.
24:45 for the startup! Awesome sounds of that Miniscribe! Gotta miss those stepper motor sounds!
A few details from an old-skool Mac-head (now reformed; I use Ubuntu).
The keyboard reset switch had no function on the SE series but was used as a power switch on the Mac II series which had software-controlled latching power supplies. It took advantage of a spare pin in the ADB cables. Interesting note: you could use an S-video cable as a really long ADB cable if you needed.
The expansion slot was called NuBus. Adding the card did not require the user to get near the CRT as it fed through the horizontal slot in back. I never saw an SE series machine with a card, but NuBus cards were common in Mac II series machines. I used a Mac IIfx for a few years: its ADB controller chips were in fact two 6502 CPUs! I decided that IIfx meant "II f-ing expensive." It cost $20,000 new with 4MB RAM and an 80MB SCSI hard disk, and a 50MHz 68030 CPU!
The two mystery buttons on the side of the mobo are the "programmer's switch". The front one (if memory serves) was a reset button and the other one issued an interrupt so developers could call up a debugger.
+Murray Pearson If you call ubuntu reformed then you are sadly mistaken.
Please follow these steps to be reformed.
1. Look at yourself in the mirror for 4 hours. If you can resist the urge to immediately smash your head into the adjacent wall, you are already 50% done.
2. Stop using ubuntu and use something called getting a life. It's simple. Just unplug (Or don't) everything electronic, pick it up, and chuck it in the nearest bin.
3. Go out, get drunk, and wake up 3 days later with no idea what happened underneath a bridge in southern texas.
+AmperaYT +Murray Pearson After having written your own linux distro, don't forget that bit ;)
I used to remember some codes you could enter to get yourself out of crashed apps without doing a full restart using the programers switch.
"Hah! Look at this -Davetown! I've got to have a look at davetown!"
Last Modified: Jan 22, 2013
Hmm..
Obviously turned it on before taking it apart. Who could blame him?
@@petersage5157 i wonder if dave minded he set a monster loose.
Those circuit lines on the PCB are just beautiful. All parallel in mostly one direction, just so cool! Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't feel like modern boards have quite that beautiful style.
Yes, it's annoying enough difference when I turn my head. Not trivial to fix in post production, just adds annoying extra steps, so mostly I let it fly.
That handle was genuinely useful, and it really was a portable machine.
I used to take my SE30 from work to home every night. Just a few cables, keyboard, mouse, voila.
Just think, those old retro computers, helped give us the far-better modern computers that we have today.
Johnno9999
And people do not even know how to use a slate-board anymore. Nor a fountain pen.
If you were stuck on some deserted island with no modern technology for many decades, you would be doing good, just to build just 1 transistor and to find some way to power it.
*****
What do you do after you have predictably found food? Spend the next several months trying to make enough rope to make a rescue raft to get off the island? As the star character in the movie "Castaway" did? It is really hard work to make rope, when you don't have some handy factory machine to do it for you.
*****
Where would you get enough hair? Certainly not from your head. No, you need to process quite a lot of plant stems to get your rope.
Do you have any idea of the huge amount of rope needed to lash together a raft? And even such a raft, is hardly sea-worthy.
Now if you just had some petroleum, and an oil refinery, and you could make nylon, and then you make a machine to wind all the strands. But how are you going to do all that, on some deserted island?
According to "Castaway", it literally took him months, and he was trying to get his raft ready, in time for the seasonal shipping currents or something. How else could he get off the island and back to civilization?
It is not like in some silly video game, in which what you need, is neatly positioned nearby, just sitting on a desk or inside of a smash-able crate.
17:26 MC68000P8 - the same processor can be found also in Amiga 500 ans Atari ST.
*and
And a bunch of other computers of the generation, from Sun workstations to the Sega Genesis, it even appears in the TI-89 graphing calculator and versions of it are still used in embedded systems.
Not bad for a chip that came out in 1979.
Yep, video of that is on my alternate channel.
i was supposed to finish some smd soldering... but AGAIN, i´m sitting here with a pizza, watching your teardown. sometimes your videos give me the same feeling like taking something apart myself :)
Apple has always been known for their handles on their computers. But even today: The "old" Mac Pro and the "new" Mac Pro have handles, I really appreciate handles and always did so!
The expansion slot in these things was the same form factor as the NuBus, continued to be used in 90s macs. I have a rescued SE/30 with a whopping 10 meg ethernet card in it. Actually managed to get it onto the internet with a 10base2 to 10baseT converter! The machine's SCSI drive had died, and some of the 30-pin RAM SIMMS were bad, so I resurrected it with parts stolen from a 386. It now has a 200 MB hard drive and about 32 MB of RAM. wonder how much that would have sold for back in the 80s if such a thing had existed? :-)
It's definitely not a NuBus slot. It's basically the 68000's pinout exposed on a connector.
you should overclock it, put 8 gigs of ram in the expansion slot, give it water cooling, replace the floppy disk with a solid state hard drive, rewrite the OS a little so it is capable of color, remove the CRT and replace it with a color LCD, replace the old keyboard ports with USB, and get all the yellow stuff off it (or at least make it all one color) then you install a bunch of games, turn it into a battery powered portable and then your done XD
Hey Dave - Glanced through the comments and didn't see it mentioned, but that handle/bracket which was blocking your hand getting to the power connector looked like was removable with two screws, letting you get in much closer. As for the custom plate, back in graduate school, it was common to add a custom mount to devices that were parked in spaces where they didn't have a stable foot print, esp. if they were over expensive equipment. That tape could be vibration dampening (since aged).
The VLSI chip is the IWM or Integrated Woz Machine. It's a functional equivalent of the original Apple II disk controller card designed by Steve Wozniak, with enhancements to support the Sony 3.5 inch drives. The switches were the Reset and the Programmer's Switch (a manual interrupt basically). There was an external plastic snap-on piece with levers which pressed the actual switches on the board inside the case.
At least as far as the original B&W Macs go, the SE/30 was a beast. It was as fast or, in some configurations, faster than the top-of-the-line Mac II and, although the SE/30 wasn't cheap, it cost a whole lot less than a Mac II. There was one equipped with a 24 bit color graphics card in service in my high school into at least the mid 90s.
Dave, I'm sure you've figured it out but that isn't the original keyboard. Also, the two tactile switches on the board are for reset and interrupt. There's normally a button panel that snaps onto the side of the machine with fingers that reach through the slots in the case to push them.
I love these vintage teardowns! been wathing these from EEV all day =)
Ah I just love these videos in spite of my limited knowledge of electronics engineering. It's the enthusiasm and general likeability of our australian friend :P
It's amazing watching it all redraw due to memory constraints, especially when moving back to a background window.
I used a lot of these in high school. I got a kick out of the technology back then. We had a whole room full of these on a LAN, sharing a single Laserwriter printer. Only wish they had color screens!
zimbabwe aka john cena
I'm not sure which is a worse insult, your comment or your spelling. At least spell Brony right next time LOL.
zimbabwe aka john cena Dude, I'm somebody who wants nothing to do with that fandom, and even _I_ am offended.
thats fk cool. wish i was born in that time!
TheDiamondHack fun 4 me
zimbabwe aka john cena Zimbabwe sucks
This brings back memories... Thanks so much...
And reading the other comments about debugging - I'd forgotten about the "Even Better Mr Bus Error" extention... :) Those were the days..
All apple keyboards from the Apple II up to and into the USB era had a "Reset" key which was initially tied to an interrupt and used to break into the debugger. It was used by consumers to reset the computer as well (Ctrl+Command+Reset) and once soft power on became big, it was used as the power button up until the iMac when it was changed to the power key and bore the standard power symbol.
Interesting video! Little tip for the screen flicker, if you turn your shutter speed down (probably as low as it'll go- 1/30 of a second or so) it will help get rid of the flicker. As well, I had a bit of a giggle at 30:04 when you said circuit simulator lol
One thing I believe should have been mentioned, that the difference in the modem-port and the printer-port were only in the nomenclature. When you added any device to one of those two ports, you had to tell the computer into which port you plugged them in to. Usually you saw the same symbols on the software side as you saw on the back of the computer. I've been asked one too many times, why you couldn't connect a modem to the printer-port, yet YOU CAN ! Also, you could connect a printer to the modem-port, they are both exactly the same !
There is one key difference, particularly in older macs. That is that only the Printer port could be used for Localtalk networking. If you tried to connect to a Localtalk network with the modem port, it wouldn't work. Some of the later Old-World PowerMacs could use either port, but all of the 68k-based Macs could not. In fact, if you turned Appletalk on with any Mac that didn't have some kind of Ethernet port (either built-in or on an expansion card), it would disconnect any device you had configured for the printer port.
As for other devices, yes, you could use them in either port, be they modems, printers, or anything else the serial ports could connect to.
Without the multifinder enabled and screensaver installed (as well as other addons), the system and finder take up less memory. I remember I had to upgrade to a minimum of 2MB on my SE in order to run the After Dark Star Trek edition screensaver.
these videos are very entertaining even without profound knowledge of electronics. thx for the effort man ;)
Very buildable, but so much more for the same effort today. Fascinating thanks :)
On Macintosh computers in the 90s the button behind the main keyboard was the power on button, you'd press it to turn the computer on, but of course the SE has a physical power switch on it. You could keep the SE and use it for basic word processing tasks where you don't need to E-mail documents to people, or you could scour the Internet for games then when your son's a bit older he could play some basic games on it.
yep, we had when I was in elementary school, the computer is placed on a spacial cage that covers the sides and top pf the computer, then the screw bolts things screw into it through the main cage, then that cake is bolted to the table. (those computers were built really tough (handled quite a few textbooks being thrown at them :) )
The switches are NMI and reset - a plastic panel to use them was either around $5 or came with most programming languages.
All the things in the Apple menu are added to the system, as well as the icons that show up on the bottom. It will run much faster if you clean them up. It makes the system several times bigger and slower. People where just as bad then about bogging their system down with silly add-ons.
HyperCard is probably on there, and is a really awesome and useful programme.
an unbelievably beautiful example of well engineered hardware. ram expansion slots, onboard scsi and a hi-res display....the first time I saw the Mac se in action, I remember feeling guilty for wishing that I owned one, instead of my trusty six month old Amiga 500.
I noticed that the varta battery hadn't leaked, which isn't bad for a 28-year-old machine. the same type of varta battery (and the same year too) was installed in my (now fully restored) amiga a2000, where the 'kin thing had leaked and 'ate' a hole; the size if a blue whale's sphincter, right through the mainboard.
'Jerry built' was obviously a redundant complement to 'west germany' - even back in '88. ;)
ref: "what to do with apple?"
clean her up, Dave, and place her in your computer museum - next to the others. amiga, apple, acorn (archimedes), atari - the four A's of legend. best 'geek porn' ever....that is, if there is such a thing? maybe that's an 'exploitable' market niche for those entrepreneurs amongst us.....
thanks for posting mate! quality and entertaining content as always.
The amount of precision required in modern hard drives is absolutely staggering. You could probably count the tracks on that old clunkin' SCSI drive.
Love the racket from those old stepper-motor-actuactor drives..
About that stuck on plate on the bottom: The feet look like they would slot into some sort of mount, like to make sure you couldn't pick it up, or if it were on some sort of stand or something, it couldn't tip over.
They had one of these setup as a server in the computer lab at my elementary school when I was young... At the time it was very powerful compared to the other systems hooked up to it, mainly Apple IIGS. Definitely the good old days..
Awesome, thanks!
That metal plate on the bottom is a more secure option for mounting in things like computer labs. Those feet fit into locking rails on the table, so the thing can't be picked up at all
DIP packs are usually just resistors going cross the package, eg pin 1 to pin max.
Occasionally it is useful that all the resistors are on the same thick film and much closer to each other than to the nominal value, eg. resistor ladders in ADC circuits.
Hi Dave I would like to see more vintage computers teardown :) love them videos can watch them over and over :) thanks for the great videos.
Also the two buttons on the board. On the back of the original Mac was a reset button and an interrupt button. Interrupt I think crashed the OS to a stack dump screen or something similar (been many many years since I remember pressing that button)
Worked on the Mac SE/30 back in the early 90s. The trick to taking the case off is to place your hands on the sides and yank it back. Next step was to remove the CRT yoke plate to protect the CRT. A common problem was that the hard drive would get stuck in the park position. This was easily cured by giving the right side of the unit a good slap with the hand, at the height of the floppy drive, and the system would boot up.
Dave, see if you can get your hands on a NeXT computer (no idea how easy that'll be Down Under - or anywhere, really). NeXT were really proud of their hardware and manufacturing (here's their detailed presentation of the motherboard production: watch?v=sT6aphdX0rI ). It's basically the exact same processes as today - just 25 years ago!
For the uninformed: NeXT was Steve Jobs's 2nd computer company after he got fired from Apple in 1985. They built advanced high-end UNIX-based workstations, and their OS is the basis for current day Mac OS X. An expensive niche computer to be sure, but lots of advanced stuff in there with tons of impact on current tech (not just Macs). Noteworthy: Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT machine to create the World Wide Web. So yeah, big tip of the hat to NeXT!
I love the sound of that old hard drive.
I remember playing on these old machines. Great fun.
Those old hard drives had an interesting quirk: the head seek motor shaft protrudes outside the drive, pity you didn't check it out further.
The hard drive is a Miniscribe model 8425 (which also existed with the ST506/MFM interface), with stepper motor head actuator. It was a very common drive back in the days and quite a big number of these arrived at today still working or at least in a restorable state.
I suggest to desolder the old battery as a lot of them were prone to literally explode and spill acid all over the mainboard and even on the chassis! I saw some months ago a Mac SE/30 with what were the remainings of a Maxell battery, which exploded and its acids corroded badly the mainboard and even the metallic chassis over it until the point it became rusty! Do it as soon as you can to prevent this disaster, I personally put away all the batteries in my old Macs.
The drawing speeds you see towards the end of the video are faster than most of the Windows Vista machines had and are still faster than on many modern (underpowered) Windows systems...
+Rafael Santana I am not an Apple fan at all, but it is true that old Systems often ran faster, although they where less powerful, because the old Software was not so much blaoted. Thiys is not only true for apple, also for old PCs. And yes, many machines with Vista where underpowered at the time Vista was released, but only because the System requirements of Vista where too heavy for that time, it was impossible to build a PC that runs Vista fast enough for the average selling Price of a PC (Although I don't think that they had 256MB-machines with Vista, because you cannot run Vista with 256MB without heavy modifications). And the main reaon why Vista needed so powerful PCs was unneccessary Software bloat and eye-candy.
I love the sound of the hard drive
Dave, it is a antique piece. Keep it running and in another 15 years time who knows it will be worth a million dollars :)
Wow! Great tear-down, thank you! If you want to transform it, it's a fun project to toss in a mini-atx form factor mobo, and replace everything to modern parts, so it looks retro but is actually all modern. Then put an emulator on it. Or altogether different is to tear down a netbook and toss it into there, seeing how the boards are integrated already. Another way to go is to use a raspberry pi.
Others have probably made this point in the past, but the button on the top of the keyboard was generally used as a power button for Macs that supported soft power-on. That's why it's set apart from the other keys.
+Shmeh Fleh And that is also why they removed it. Just hitting it accidentally would turn off your macintosh runining all your progress. It's happened to me before, and on other windows keyboards too. It's just a stupid thing to have. Seriously are people too lazy to turn shit on?
No, it's not a power switch, it's a soft power switch. So if you hit it during the machine is power on, you will see a dialog if you want to shut the machine of.
I love the sound of stepper motor hard drives.
I've got a couple vintage computers that I still play on. One of them, a Tandy 1000HX is as old as I am (1987), and still works, with the exception of the RTC chip. Phillips used to make 24 pin packages that would plug in under the BIOS, with the BIOS piggybacking into that, since RTC clocks weren't really a standard feature on PCs at the time, and that's what this machine has. The battery on that chip JUST RECENTLY crapped out after 30 years, and they're rated to last for 10! That's a NASA warranty for you there! Had to dremel into the chip to cut the connections to the two button-cell batteries, and bodge some wires to connect another battery. It works again :D
I'm no Apple fanboi either, but I still find the vintage Macs fascinating.
More fun: Check out Microchip AN591, it's an application note on talking the ADB protocol with PICs! It's for client side communication only, but still very cool.
Enjoyed that. I gutted one of these a couple years ago (it was dead already, I promise) and I stuck an LCD in it, and some hard drives, and a mac mini, and turned it into my media hub :)
that button on top of the keyboard used to turn some of the newer mac's on back in the 90's
retrobright that case! I used the process on an Apple IIc, looked like new when I was done.
0.0078 gigahertz processor. Once upon a time, it was theorised that they couldn't make a processor faster than 500 Mhz. You had to enable big drive support on Widows 95 for hard drives larger than 512 megabytes.
I really like the old soldermask on this one!
Very dark without copper, very green with copper!
Tactile switches are reset and interrupt. An accessory called the "programmer's switch" could be snapped to the side to allow easy access to these switches.
That was the absolute best feature of the old macs--a built in assembly level debugger.
pocoapoco2
The interrupt switch can even get you out of a serious jam. If the program crashes with a "bomb", and the only choice given is to restart, hit the interrupt button. A command prompt will appear; type in G FINDER and press return. If the OS data in RAM is not corrupt, this will dump you to the Finder and possibly allow you to save some of your work.
I don't miss cooperative multitasking!
Andrew Kwiecinski Ah, those were the days! :p
I still have the switch connected on my old Mac. It's a piece of plastic the has fins that fit through the case and hit the two buttons as mentioned for reset and interrupt. Super helpful when debugging code.
I've watched a few of these videos and now I'm really scared of holding my phone upside-down in case any of the electrons fall out :'(
LOL (also, the electrons won't fall out)
Alex Jamieson ... I know.
+Maffoo Psh, electrons?! With these smart phones nowadays, you'd better make sure you aren't leaking any 1s or 0s!
Just install the Electron Retention App.
Loved it. Thanks for that David !
God.. I Love that old fashion hard-drive sound!
I guess I was very privalaged in 1988 when my dad got a Commodore Amiga 2000. Comparatively it was years ahead of Apple and had a much more graphic GUI as well (Amiga Woekbench).
I used the Amiga for at least 10 years. Only when Nvidia came out with their TNT chip and Creative released the Soundblaster Live! soundcard the Amiga became properly old. But that is 10 years later... a striking long useful life for a computer.
Years ahead of Apple? Perhaps ahead of the Mac SE, but the Mac II came out at the same time as the Amiga 2000, featuring the 68020 at 16 MHz vs the 68000 at 8 MHz in the Amiga 2000. Graphics were 640x480x8 vs 640x256x12 in the Amiga. What's a "much more graphic GUI" ? I think you don't know what you are talking about.
Those two switches you were unsure of were for reset and the programmer (debugger) switch.
Looking at this makes you appreciate just how far ahead Commodore were with their Amiga machines. They had a proper pre-emptive multitasking full colour operating system back then!
Except the Amiga was already behind Apple at this point. This was the SE, meant to be Apple’s cheaper offering. It was released at the exact same time as the Macintosh II (March 87). The Mac II supported full colour, NuBus expansion slots, multiple monitors, a 68020 + FPU. The Amiga didn’t even get a 68020 until a year later.
@@beefchicken The AMIGA was behind Apple in 1987! I think you need to go back to 1987 and refresh your memory.
@@brianhoskins1979 I think you need to read wikipedia. Apple released a computer with a 68020 in 1987. Atari did not.
19:30 the buttons are not named A & B - the letters are for finding component locations referring to schematics and/or board layout. The board layout on the hard disk screams Seagate :D
The buttons are cumulatively called the "programmer's switch", and it was accessed through a snap-in button set that poked through the ventilation slots. One of them was the Reset button (does what you expect) and one was the Interrupt button, which triggered the debugger.
love how its "talking" too you
Two tactile switches: Back in the day, a software developer would install an Apple-supplied 2-button plastic switch which reached down to the switched on the motherboard. One button allowed you to drop into a 68k debugger (so you could see where you were in a hung program). The other button forced a system reboot without needed to cycle the power.
Thats right! One was called the "programmer's switch" which put you in a debug mode when your program crashed, which a lot of software did back in the day. I had a Mac Classic running Master Tracs Pro to control my midi keyboards. Those were the days!
Hmm, I do have an old SPO-256-AL2 speech chip...
I don't know how the TH-cam live show thing works, but is there a sections where viewers can type messages to you?
If yes, then perhaps parse out that text and send it to a homebrew TTS circuit :D
No, they just happen to use the same connector type.
Is the nearly 30 year old battery going to create corrosion in system?
(I really wanted to send you a replacement when i saw it! lol)
Wow this brought back memories of being an Apple authorised repairer.. You look so awkward doing stuff that we did day in and day out ;-) Good stuff.
Whoa, an uncle of mine probably had one of these till somewhere around 1998. I was always amazed about how it could tell you that it was starting up with the desktop basically already there, while my 486 was telling me that Windows was loading. By the way, for some reason I got some serious ASMR when he was slowly turning the thing around...
The plate on the bottom is an anti-theft plate. They were commonly used in libraries and schools and such. The tool that is used to open the MacSE (and other similarly cased Mac's) was the 'Mac Crack Tool'. It was nothing special, just a long handled torx driver. The rest key on the keyboard was used to reset the computer itself, not just the bus. (Similar to a Control-Alt-Delete, Control, Open-Apple, Reset).
Someone probably already mentioned this, but what the heck.... The Apple Keyboard II is not the keyboard that came with the Macintosh SE. The SE had a different model - very similar in size and functionality to the one in the tear-down. The mouse is also not the original; the one that came with the SE had a white ball which was much bigger and heavier than the black ball. It is quite common for parts to get mixed up over the years on vintage computers.
We were still using these for admin staff in 1995 - they were durable units. but a lot of them hit the dumpster when pan and tilt VDUs were made mandatory in the UK. There was an aftermarket mod that pan & tilted the whole unit which might be what that metal plate on the base was to do with. By the time I left they had ethernet cards and a web browser NCSA mosaic on them so they straddle an era when Germany was divided into east and west to the start of the web era.
Don't think you mentioned it but there's no eject button for the 3.5" floppy, disk writes were heavily buffered and you were supposed to eject in software (by dragging the floppy icon into the dustbin) If it crashed with a floppy stuck in there you had to poke a paperclip through the pinhole next to the drive to manually eject.
I've had these open but never saw the stamped in signatures before - seems like a typical wanky apple thing to do, this was supposed to be affordable model and they're basically sticking the cost of an unneccesary extra manufacturing process on the customer for vanity (could have had it moulded into the inside of the plastic shell for nothing)
re: the reset button.. It's just a power button (nothing really special about it), but because the old macintoshes didn't have soft power to keep the RTC or anything else (like an ADB controller) running when the computer was off, they needed a separate line for the power switch. That's why it's not hooked up to the controller chip. Also worth noting... that keyboard is newer than this computer; the power button actually doesn't do anything for the SE. It'll work on a Classic II, though!
And, oh, i remember being really proud of my IBM PCjr at the time when a friend of mine bought his mac. Oh, beautifully outstanding.
To be fair, the Jr. was likely more useful.
I think the bottom plate has been put on to help mount the machine in some kind of portable arrangement (Rack case etc) - i have seen these machines being used in live performance as MIDI interface controllers.
Close (and it probably could also be used as you described, even if that wasn't the main intent). It is the top half of a 3rd-party security plate. That, and the software install, indicate this machine was originally from a student computer lab at a university or college. The glued-on plate locks into a plate similarly glued/bolted to the desk. I have encountered similar (different manufacturer and slightly different design, but very similar) plats on machines purchased ex-labs from my local university back in the day.
I had a Mac IIci back in the early '90s. It was made to open up easily for adding expansion cards. The motherboard design was quite clean from what I recall. Running System 7, it could play small Quicktime videos, which I thought was pretty amazing back in the day.
Looks like the one in the "back to the future II" antiques shop!
The first PC I used. I was on a flight test at Pt Mugu, and writing reports of the flights for GE. We were flying F14s at each other to test an airborne infrared detection system. I flew out to Eglin AFB where we had another flight test going to visit and learn from my boss how to use the Mac (we used VAX systems back at the plant). He said "I'm going golfing - you'll figure it out ." Sure enough, darned easy to use.
Boots faster than a lot of new windows machines. LOL
I personallly didnt think it was that slow. When you consider what it was doing and that it is running at 7mHz. It's actually pretty amazing... They were amazing.. It's why they sold so many of them.
How many new computers will still work in 27 years....LOL... Not many.
They did build good hardware.
Surprized that battery had not gone bad. Maybe it was replaced at some point.
Be interesting to see if they came with the battery made in Germany.
kens97sto171 you do know that the OS was made for that MAC do you? even a fridge can run that OS today
+kens97sto171 imagine win 3.1 booting up on a high end gaming computer. :P
+Fascinated Heavy I was working with computers before this Mac was built.. so yes... and maybe you misunderstood. I said it was amazing it ran so well in that hardware considering the speed... I've got an i5 workstation that doesn't boot much faster.
my point was that machine was amazing for its time.
+Markus Biörck I have done that, with virtualization. You type "win" at the DOS prompt, and you are instantaneously at Program Manager with zero perceptible delay, because the entire OS easily fits in the disk cache, and the entire OS also fits inside the CPU. No need for accessing the sticks of ram, whole OS runs in L3 cache.
+Doug Gale The ineptitude of google has no limits, does it? Look at what it did to the quote and the accented character. Such a joke.
Commodore proudly named its chips (MOS xxxxx) because they made them. MOS Tech wasn't marketing at all, it was a real IC maker and CBM had real logic designers.
No speech chip needed! It can be synthesized by the main CPU through software: Search for "MacInTalk 2". It's an add on to the system software, released by Apple.