My New Macintosh SE

I recently acquired a Macintosh SE from 1987. This is now the oldest computer in my collection. Well, "collection" that is, I didn't really have many computers that most people would consider worth anything... until now.

skeleton candle lamp not included

I picked up this little cutie for $90 on ebay. This was a really good deal, as it was in very good physical condition and works fine. It just needed a little cleaning with a "magic eraser" pad, which is like a really fine sandpaper that gets rid of scuffs incredibly well, and you can buy them almost anywhere, just be careful not to scrub too hard and remove spots of the yellowing. It came with the keyboard and mouse, I'm fairly certain these aren't the peripherals that it would have originally came with, this is an Apple Keyboard II and Apple Desktop Bus Mouse II. It didn't really matter whether it came with peripherals, because the SE and newer Apple computers came equipped with ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) and finding ADB peripherals on ebay is easy, not to mention I already had some. This is the original model of the SE, with the 20MB HDD and the 68000 CPU. Unfortunately, the engravings of the designer's names on the inside of the case are absent, meaning this was most likely made later than the original release of 1987.

Speaking of the inside of the case, this little SE was in working condition, but not perfect working condition. Over the years (and perhaps the economy shipping across the US), the HDD had failed. First off, turning the machine around, I could see the expansion port was open with some strange connectors coming out of the back. Now I had never seen these before, but after some research I found out that these were some kind of outdated networking connections, "thinnet" and "thicknet" connectors alongside an unpopulated section where an RJ45 ethernet port would have been implemented. Too bad, it would have been really interesting if it came with networking I could actually use.

The back of the SE, from the ebay listing, before cleaning.

The next thing I noticed was rather strange, perhaps you've already noticed from that image... It has phillips-head screws securing the case. I can only imagine that the previous owner got fed up with the standard torx screws, and replaced them with phillips-head. The screws it's supposed to have are black T15 torx screws. I found the "customization" didn't end there. 

When I removed the HDD, which was quite a hassle, I found some more interesting changes. The HDD might have been replaced with a 160MB drive, but it is really hard to tell, because of an almost complete lack of markings. However, more obvious was that the HDD led (normally an early dim red led) was replaced with a modern lensed blue led. Furthermore, the led connector clearly did not fit into the socket on the drive, so it was shoved into place and glued heavily. I would have preferred if the previous owner had soldered it in place.

I also found that the PRAM battery was still good, so it most likely had been replaced fairly recently. Luckily, the system came with the full 4MB of RAM.

I took the drive out and connected it to my Beige Power Macintosh G3 to try and recover the data off it. Unfortunately, even after some fanagaling, I merely got the drive to attempt to spin up, then it gave up for good (and crashed my G3 in the process). 

So I needed another solution. Low-speed, low-capacity SCSI drives on ebay were rather expensive, especially since they probably wont work for much longer, as they don't make them anymore. The SE, just like all Macintoshes, has an external SCSI connector for hooking up external drives , so that was an option. Once again ebay failed me, turning up mostly empty enclosures and server hotswap bays. I then saw an external Iomega Zip drive... and that gave me an idea.

For those of you who don't know, Zip was a format of removable 100MB cartridges, similar to floppy technology, but just like modern floppies- not floppy at all. My idea started with the fact that my Power Macintosh G3 has an SCSI internal zip drive. I figured that if I install System 7.1 (the optimal  OS for the SE) onto a zip cartridge, leave it in the drive, and plug the whole drive with disk into the SE, it acts like a 100MB HDD.

the label of the SCSI zip drive

This actually booted the SE perfectly. However the floppy drive was mounted upside-down inaccessible from the outside, and the zip drive had a unfortunate habit of ejecting on shutdown. Not to mention the G3 was left without a zip drive.

 Luckily, a long time ago, I was given an SCSI Iomega JAZ drive and a whole box of disks. This is similar to the Zip drive, but it uses 1GB cartridges similar to HDD technology. I was never able to even test it because I didn't have the necessary cable to connect it to anything. I've got a whole pile of SCSI cables with centronics connectors on one end, and I don't have a single device with a centronics connector on it. I can only assume these are relics of printers past.

The JAZ drive

I bought a DB25 cable for a Zip drive for $12 on ebay, and used an adapter I had handy to connect it to the high-density clamp-style SCSI connector on the JAZ drive. It took me a long time to get the drive working on the G3 (so that I could format it). I tried every combination of Iomega tools and drivers until I got it working. Version 6.x works fine with the Zip and JAZ drives, but drives formatted with 6 won't boot in older Macintoshes. Driver version 4.2 with no tools can be used to format Zip disks through the OS but not JAZ disks. Careful not to load a JAZ or Zip disk formatted with 4.3 or older into a computer running 6.x, as I've heard it will overwrite the drivers on the disk and it will no longer work with older Macintoshes.

I ended up coming to the conclusion that if you want the JAZ drive to work with both the G3 and older computers such as the SE you must use Iomega tools (and driver) version 4.3. I formatted a JAZ disk with 4.3 and installed system 7.1 on a JAZ cartridge and the SE booted off it perfectly.

Since the SE doesn't have any LAN networking that I can use, I used an Apple DB9 serial cable (that I use to sync my Newton Messagepad 110 with the G3) to connect the G3 and the SE together and transfer some programs and games to the SE. I found a really helpful guide for how to do this. (Just a side note, they still sell these on Amazon)

I initially came across an error with the serial file sharing. When I would try to log in to the fileshare on the SE side I would get a "divide by zero" error.

I found that this was most likely due to something I had done in the past. The HDD on the G3 failed a couple of months ago, and I replaced it with a 500GB IDE drive, and Mac OS 9 initialized 129GB of it because that is the maximum it can support. Even though I was only sharing one folder, I think the SE tried to mount the HDD and got confused. This could also just be because the SE can only understand partitions up to 2GB in size, I'm not entirely sure. 

I manged to get around this by sticking a Zip disk into the drive on the front of the G3 and shared that instead of the HDD. This way I could just copy what I want to share to the Zip disk and the SE only had to mount a 100MB Disk.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to play some Thexder.