My first exposure to a Macintosh was my Aunt’s SE/30, as a graphic designer she used it for work. My computer was an Apple //c, my first mac an LC in 1990.
A while ago I stumbled upon infinitemac.org, a project that catalogues and emulates classic Macintosh operating systems from System 1 to early version of OS X.
I sat down for a while just poking around in System 6.0.8, one of the versions i used the most. What struck me about it immediately was how zen and minimal it was, and yet so unlike sitting at a C:/ prompt in DOS. Also, the time flew and I realized how free of distraction I’d felt for that time.
That began a months long quest to not just use the operating system for actual productivity, but return to something I’d tried over a decade ago: restore a machine to working state.
Try again
The trouble the first time I tried this was immediate: I got a working Classic II for free and it happily booted and had Word 4.0 on it. Great! But the floppy drive was not particularly reliable and I didn’t have any way to get data onto any floppies in the first place. Soon after, the hard drive tanked and it wouldn’t boot. Now I had a cute but large footprint paperweight with a blinking disk icon. I thought about Macquariums, or stuffing a digital picture frame or arduino into it, but none of those ideas really worked. I eventually abandoned the idea and gutted the machine, along with a non-working Plus and SE, and created three empty vessels spray-painted Red, Green, and Blue. It was a consolation prize that I still display, but I neither the time, knowledge, or inclination to push it any further.
And Again
Today, there’s community of users creating hardware bridging many of the obsolete and finicky hardware: BlueSCSI and Big Mess O’ Wires Floppy Emu are among the most useful. And 68k software, books, and manuals are widely documented and distributed on the internet — so if if you get it running, you’ll be set.
Keep Calm and Solder On
In the end, I restored a 1989 SE/30, a computer I never would have dreamed of owning then. The logic and analog boards required removing and replacing all the electrolytic capacitors and a good clean with 99% IPA. I had to learn how to solder, and ripped off more than one SMD pad in the process… but the internet is full of great resources, like recapamac.
256 Shades of Gray
The bliss of black-and-white simplicity was made even better by a modern equivalent to the now-legendary micron XCEED PDS card, which allows an SE/30 to display 8-bit grayscale internally, and color externally. Since the SE/30 was basically Macintosh Iix in a compact shell, this meant you could do all the color prepress work on one of these machines. Someone went through the trouble of creating a modern equivalent, and running an SE/30 with subtle, milky shades of gray is a joy.
I/O, I/O it’s off to work we…
I’ve used a mechanical keyboard from KeyChron for a while now, as the typing experience with the clicky-clicky is something I prefer. Apple’s own Extended Keyboard used robust mechanical switches. To keep desk footprint small, I manage to snag a sweet Blue Kensington Turbo Mouse Trackball.
Inside, BlueSCSI 2.0 replaces the hard drive with a partitioned 4GB SD card, able to boot into System 6.0.8, 7.1 or 7.5. The near-silent Noctua fan inside creates a soft white noise, but gone are the whining HDD and noisy stock fan.
The Floppy Emu allows for native installation of available software via .dsk images, removing the need for gunky floppy drive repair. I may restore one eventually, but I don’t really see the point. With a 4GB SD card, you can have all the floppies you’d ever need on one storage medium, and swapping is as easy and scrolling through some menus on the device. Plus! The “Noisy Disk Mechanical Sounder” for makes floppy-reading clicky-ness so you know it’s readin’ and writing’.
Always ROMemeber
Also from Stever Chamberlain, the ROMinator II replaces the stock ROM module, complete with a flushable, bootable ROM disk, boots the SE/30 32-bit clean so it can address more than 8MB RAM (though it can support 128MB, that’s absurd). I was able to get a ROM programmer from Caymac Vintage, though I have yet to sit down with HexFiend or the Crucible app to really have fun tinkering with the ROM.
With a little help from my friends
What shrine wouldn’t be complete without mini versions:
The Pico Mac Nano is a bootable (!), functional Mac about 4 inches tall, running off a Pi Pico board, Running system… 5 I think? It’s more a technical wonder than practical, but if I can reflash the Pico Nano to have just enough RAM to run MacPaint… then it’ll be even more fun.
A Maclock is a larger facsimile of the 128k case that displays the time, date, temp or the Susan Kare Mac Smile.
And Chris McVeigh’s 128k Lego Mac build — which even has a detachable back case and lego CRT/Analog board sits next to the Classic Apple logo Lisa cup and binary 24-hour clock.
And also essential in all of this is Paul Pratt’s vMac emulator (and/or Sheepshaver) — which allows you easy emulation and setup of all the disks and content you use on the physical machine.
The project is currently being maintained on GitHub, thank goodness.
I have an Asante MacCon ethernet card for getting on the internet or local network, but I need to desolder the PDS connector and install a right angle version so it can daisy chain with the video card.
Once I get DaynaPort Wifi running on the BlueSCSI, I’ll be able to FTP my writing to the local NAS.
Then this little 40 year old machine can live happily with modern hardware as a distraction-less writing haven.
Next up is restoring a QuickSilver G4, one of the last of the high end native OS 9 machines (thanks Susie!) so I can create a 68k markdown editor application, a la Ulysses or Tex-Edit so I can write and preview most markdown files natively in System 7, and port al the content to a modern mac… also can play just about any game for OS 9.2.2, so here I come Castle Wolfenstein 3D.
My inner middle school child is sooooooo geeked out right now.