I got my SE for the price of a coke out of the vending machine, there was this e-waste company up the road when I moved into this town and I showed up a lunch, just some guy wandering into a dumpy ass warehouse at lunch like hey man... how much you want for this performa 200, this SE and this amiga ... the workers looked at me like I was speaking spanish or something and said "I dunno the boss is out to lunch"... its got to be like 110F in this place dead summer in middle TN ,there's 4 guys that don't know what the hell I am doing there and things are starting to get awkward... so I say "listen these things are sitting face down in the mud, its hotter than hell in here I got 5 bucks in 1 dollar bills and there's a coke machine over there, let me grab them and buy you all an ice cold drink in exchange for these machines" SOLD!
I had an SE running System 6.0.8. It was amazingly seamless. If I'm not mistaken, it was the last operating system the world will ever see, that was made by a group of people who all worked in the same building.
I loved my SE/30, I got it around the time the Quadras were being rolled out, and as a kid, it was a delight to play with a Mac at home (since they'd just got the LCII's and even the teachers were running them with a manual in hand). Later moved up to a Quadra when the Power Macs rolled out (love the 6100 vid because I had the 610), got a Power Mac 8100 when the G3 iMacs rolled out. Now, I have a 2010 iMac I'm typing this on. For those of us who've had to get by with the last generation, revisiting the older macs is a ton of fun, I hope you do more.
You've had some great Macs, even if you had to settle for yesterday's model. I've never been lucky enough to use or even see an 8100. Glad you're liking the videos!
Wonderful memories of having to use these at my first workplace. We used to do our online banking back in the day on one of these machines - the extent of which was to check bank balances in relative real time.
The Mac I grew up on from age six, making me a Mac nerd for life. Schocked to learn SE stood for System Expansion. I always assumed it meant Second Edition.
Our design college had a room full of SE30's in '89. The first Mac I ever used. Around the same time a friend bought an SE30, it was something like $10k AUD. In today's money that's around $21k.
Cheers for this video, just found it. I brought a Macintosh SE with a HD and. The 4mb of ram!. It has all Manuals and keyboard, mouse, and loads of system floppy disks. Also came with a official apple carry case. I payed £40 for it and it is mint, no marks and Has been stored for years. The lady that owned it used to transport it to work from the UK to the US I couldn't imagine that pain!!!
a very good summary of the SE.I noticed this video is 8 years old, but I just found it. Many things have changed in that time and there are a lot of options now for keeping systems like this going and replacing the components that will eventually fail. It is posible to upgrade the screen to grayscale, is a bit involved but can be done. The hard drive can be replaced with a SD card on an adapter that reads disk images to simulate multiple SCSI drives. The analog boards can be replaced with more modern circuits and so on. Have a look at what the Action Retro channel has done with his SE's and you can see what can be done :)
Glad you liked the SE video. The first video of the series. It was before a lot of those options were available, so I’m glad others are inventing these things and spreading the word. Action Retro is actually one of my Patreon supporters, and, you’re right, he is a great resource for that sort of thing.
Work colleague dug out his old SE FDHD and proceeded to moan about it not starting up... percussive maintenance applied and it fired right up. Good ol' stiction on the HD's..
I must have had a super rare up top fan on my mac plus... I can't recall the name or brand, but it finished flush with the case top and rear, had no ties to power seemingly. Like the one you showed here, and what I see on ebay with the additional outlets... had none of that, just an illuminated switch up top and flush vents.
The SE Keyboard is one of the best products Apple released. I know it's not actually made by Apple (it's made by Alps Electric), but neverheless is a product that I'm actually willing to buy, new old stock or second hand.
I don't know if this has been pointed out before but your explanation of "floppy" is wrong. It's not about the plastic used for the housing, but instead it's about the physical medium within the housing. The physical medium within both 5.25" and 3.5' disks were a floppy mylar with a coating, whereas the physical medium in all hard-disk drives were a rigid metal disk with a coating.
@@65scribe , thank you. It's all good. I'm a tech expert. I've been programming since '86 and I've been in the tech industry since '94. I also used to teach PC Architecture for a computer company.
The SE was basically a Plus with a PDS, a faster SCSI implementation with an internal SCSI port, and ADB replacing the original phone-style keyboard and serial mouse. Otherwise it still had the same screen, 800k floppy, 8MHz 68k, and 4MB RAM ceiling as the basic Plus. If you already had a Plus (or could get one at a significant discount) it would have been more cost-effective to buy it more RAM and an external hard drive rather than replacing it, with the SE only becoming an attractive option if you really needed Ethernet or video out and/or the FDHD compatibility when it became available (the Plus never got FDHD upgrades and even the original SE (and Mac II) needed new chips and disk drives to get FDHD capability).
I watched the unboxing of the hard drive wile looking at my Much smaller 4 tb seagate external. Thank god for modern technology I think my keyboard has more ram/cpu then the entire SE. Good videos thanks for the effort =)
Thanks for commenting. Having a hard drive in a box that big just seemed normal at the time. When I found the box in the shed a few years ago, I just thought, "My god!". Probably true about your keyboard :)
Like your videos thank you to remind me the old systems. Clearly after 40 years this devices prove are not longer useful for even web browsers are supported. For collectors may be a good idea if you have the space and like this. But for daily bases. This computer looks like typewriters.
Hi, May be you will answer a question that i found no responding until now. I got an Mac SE FD HD version with extension card installed inside with an DB9 connector as shown in your video. What type of video monitor are compatible with ? And is it for displaying only b&w or colors ? Is it an standard rgb signal or else generated ? Some links to technical details, schematics or informations about it ? Thanks a lot and very interesting videos on your channel.. Hello from France, Paulo
@@65scribe of course . love the way you deliver your information! Youre very funny . really looking forward for it. I have back story to my collection thanks to you lol
I still have my SE in the closet. I had to replace the logic board with an SE/30 one though years ago when mine died. I did upgrade that sucker to 16mb RAM though since in no flipping way would you ever need that much RAM on an SE 😋
Yes, in the same style U.S. President Biden did with Trump. He did fall back into some of the same traps that Apple already had, like Apple Display Connector and having too many models of macs, but more on that in my next video.
The main issue going forward is probably the CRT itself. Most of these CRTs have a lot of hours on them. CRTs do not last forever and time on plays a big role. While the components will likely remain available, the CRT tubes themselves are what will eventually kill these machines. Frankly, I'm surprised the eMac has not become the new SE SE/30 /Classic. It too is an all in one machine and can use a LOT more software. Since it has USB slots and firewire, hooking things up to it just isn't as big a deal as the SEs have always been. Transferring software to an eMac is just stupidly easy. Dump the files on a thumb drive and away you go. Dealing with DD 880k disks has always been a pain in the ass.
I think it's a combination of age, size and weight. The compact Macs were always fairly light, very compact and were fairly desirable by collectors pretty early on. I was buying, reconditioning and reselling compact Macs in the mid 90s. I saw them at flea markets a lot up until ebay became really big when usenet was still the preferred way to have auctions. Ebay was easy to use and so once word about ebay got out, flea market venders jacked their prices up as if they were selling to a worldwide market with credit cards. I'd say the eMacs should start becoming collectable already. I think the newest one is like 13 years old already (they were discontinued in 06). The weight is a big killer for shipping. It costs a pretty good amount of money to ship an emac across the country. I see a lot of them on ebay and so far, prices have remained OK, but shipping is a killer. It's not nearly as iconic either.
I've picked up two eMacs in the last year or so with hopes to do a video on those. One nice and one junker. I got those and most my Macs locally on kijiji and gave up on ebay about 2006 for the reasons you mentioned above.
Do you happen to know if the emac system boards are compatible with each other? I have a low hour 700mhz version and I would love to swap the system board with a 1.42ghz version (the 1.25ghz model is known to have bad caps) if it is a drop in replacement. It doesn't really get me much, except maybe better emulation of the psx or something. I use it for audio and mame. It's great for mame for the old games.
I suspect a lot of eMacs were manufactured since they went to a lot of schools, so maybe that will keep their used price down. They show up on Craigslist a lot in Atlanta USA.
5:31 Is that a Radius card? My SE/30 had a Radius Full Page display card and I don't know if it could be compatible with an Apple portrait display adapting the DB-9 to a DB-15?
Man, what a ridiculous prices!! And these are in 1988 Canadian dollars! So, to make a quick calculation for the Mac SE 2/40: Canadian $8,111 in 1988 would be Canadian $15,605 in 2019. So that's US $11,854 or €10,404 for an unpowered Mac with a small B/W screen!! No wonder, the Mac didn't increase market share. Apple bozos (Sculley, Spindler) went for the high margin,low volume (short-term) while they had to go for the low margin, high volume market (long-term). Steve Jobs said so too.
Weird minature centrifigal tube fans or whatever, hard to find them for sale anymore, probably very hard to get the bearing balance perfect so it didn't wear out, its just double the problem vs a single bearing fan.
Of course. This is from the mactique roadshow, a spoof that macAddict put on their magazine CD-ROM. It's pretty good and you'll find it on you tube. The idea that the guy thought his classic would increase in value over time was hilarious.
Thanks, that clip gets me every time. If only people would actually sell Classic Macs for $40 rather than something ludicrously inflated. Then again, I got my Classic II, Plus, iMac G3 DV, and Quicksilver G4 for a collective of $20 and they’re all in perfect working order, so I can’t complain.
another great video, great production values, humor, I also like that you sound like Tina Belcher from Bob's Burgers ... I hope that doesn't hurt your feelings but it makes your videos so much more palatable than "others" with their yelling and over excited behavior. These are old macs not orgasms ... jeez youtubers ... oh yea the SE30 was the hot rod of the early macs because people were constantly modding them ... only the cool rebel people had them
No, that's fine (once I looked up a scene from Bob's Burgers to verify that you didn't think I sounded female!). Glad that you find my voice-overs a plus, because it's not my strong suit. Thanks for all the support and comments!
The Tina Belcher character was originally a boy BUT they changed it to a girl at the last minute. Fun fact though the voice is done by a man, so Your voice doesn't sound feminine, it just has a similar tone.
I remember that external apple drive to be so damn loud, even for those days.. but 20megabytes, that really was something! (how could anyone ever fill all that space !?) 😂
Through the wonders of modern science, it's almost entirely possible to build one of these logic boards from scratch - we've reverse engineered the GLU, the ADB chips, and now all the original macintosh/plus PAL chips have been rever engineered, a new BBU would be possible too.
I've restored a few SEs and SE/30s. Phosphor burn of the menu bar isn't so bad because if/when you use the machine there will always be a menu bar there anyway.
Getting a clean working example now for a couple hundred bucks off of ebay is now a bargain. Wish I had picked one up back in 2014 to play around with.
I have one of these. $40 sounds about right. I got mine for about $75 shipped from eBay back in 2015. I don't recall now what the price was minus the shipping though. eBay doesn't track my order history back that far. Anyways I "might" have paid a bit more then $40 not factoring the shipping though. It didn't have an internal harddrive. It was the "SuperDrive" model so should have had one. Did have the cable/LED and mounting hardware still inside though. Guess the HD was either pulled for privacy reasons or reused in another machine by previous owner. Anyways the interesting tidbit about mine was it came with a Ethernet card installed. I heard those are kinda rare. Kinda makes up for the fact I got just the main unit. It didn't come with a mouse or keyboard. I happened to already have a keyboard though. I ended up selling the Ethernet card as part cash and trade for a working hard-drive and mouse. So I no longer have the Ethernet card. Almost regret selling that. But not really. In the years that I have had this thing, I never felt the need that I needed to use it. The Ethernet card it had used a different type of connector besides the usual one modern machines used and required an adapter. I forget the details and it's a major factor in why I decided it was worth trading away for more useful parts at the time. Though trying to connect this thing to the Internet would be an amusing thing to attempt. Though at the moment this curiosity isn't enough for me to attempt finding/buying one. They are probably impossible to find on eBay for reasonable prices and I definitely wouldn't want to spend more then $10 or $20 for one. :P At the time I bought this thing I was trying to get an SE/30. But couldn't find one at a price I could afford so I ended up settling on that SE. Does have burn in though. But it isn't that bad and so far it runs fine. Though I should probably recap the analog board at some point.... :P
Great video! Actually, 3.5" floppy disks were called floppy because the disk itself is floppy, unlike a HDD's platters. It was just encased in hard plastic, unlike earlier models. Same thing with 2.8" and 3" models.
