Macintosh SE
I think I may have used a classic Macintosh once in my life, at a Kinko’s copy location of all places. We didn’t have them in school, we went from Commodore CBMs, to Apple IIe, to IBM PC 8088 clones. At the ISP I borrowed a customer’s PowerBook overnight so I could get experience with System 8 and to write how-to instructions for setting up dial-up accounts. It was nice but I didn’t bite. By 2003 when I finally bought my first Mac, a PowerBook G4, I started off on OS X.
At VCF I was playing with some of the classic macs on display and later saw some at the consignment sale. I thought why not, I am an adult, I can buy one if I want to. (Which is how I wound up buying USR Courier modems). I knew literally nothing about classic Macs, quickly googling what the difference between an SE, a Classic, and a 128k. I decided on an SE, it had an Asante Ethernet card, it seemed like a good deal so now I own an SE.
After getting home and using it, I quickly learned about the 800k floppy drives in them and I had nothing that could write disks for it. I was beginning to wish I had held out for a SE/30 with a FDHD, but here we are. It had 800k floppies of System 6 and the ethernet card driver, that was it. This is where I learned about BlueSCSI and using SCSI Zip drives to copy files to it, so I ordered an external BlueSCSI.
The next day at VCF I was browsing the sales again and this time there was a IIsi for sale, I think for like $30. I kinda wanted a color mac but learned the classic compacts didn’t have color. The small form factor won me over, it was running System 7, had a 1 GB hard drive in it, and another Ethernet card. I could at least stick it somewhere and it wouldn’t take a lot of space.
Macintosh IIsi
Now I suddenly owned two Macs! I thought as a bonus I could use it to write 800k floppies for the SE, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Those damn 800k drives. When I took the IIsi home and opened up to examine it, it’s clear somebody took very good care of it. Not only did it have the huge 1 GB replacement hard drive, all of the components were very clean. I found out later the logic board had been re-capped, had a new battery, and the guts of the power supply had been replaced with a PicoPSU adapter. Very nice.
The IIsi has been a blast to use, there’s just something nice about the System 7 interface. I maxed it out with 64 MB of RAM which seemed to help the speed a bit. It had copies of apps such as After Dark, Lemmings, Oregon Trail, I was able to get some floppy disk images from sites such as Macintosh Garden to load on ZTerm, Network Software Installer, and a few other tools. Then I started copying larger files to the BBS and downloading them to the IIsi using a modem. Eventually my AAUI transceiver cable came in and I was finally able to hook up Ethernet.
My BlueSCSI finally came in last week, so now I’ve been able to make more progress with the SE. I’ve been able to get it online. I’ve been inside it once to check things out, it does not look like a trivial machine to take apart like the IIsi. Watching some videos it seems I’ll need to replace the battery on it and possibly recap it, and the seller’s tag noted the floppy drive worked but needed to be lubricated, so all that is probably up next for it.
One more thing
Then I got a Quadra 700. I knew about the whole Jurassic Park thing, and while I love that movie, that aspect didn’t really appeal to me. When I saw the 700 at VCF I thought it was the neatest mini-tower kind of case, smaller than a PC mini-tower even, it spoke to me. That beige, those lines in the case, and Apple rainbow apple on the front, mmmm. Then I found out they’re a big collectors item because of the whole said movie thing. Prices for previous eBay auctions were all over the place, some beat and yellowed to hell, some in mint condition, from a few hundred for parts chassis to well over $1k for fully kitted systems with the PowerPC card, and they seemed to come along once a month or so.
I set an email alert, not expecting to see a system come by for a long time. Then by sheer luck several days later I happened to be up late at night browsing eBay when a Quadra was added, it looked in decent shape so I jumped on it. This is gonna be another round of picking up the bits to build it up, so far I’m in the process of getting RAM, VRAM, a drive sled, and a hard drive.
