I got a beautiful old Macintosh SE in the mail today. I've always loved the look of the old compact Macs and the SE is probably my favorite design of them. It was originally a typical 800k floppy/20MB hard drive/1MB ram machine, but apparently as I'm still trying to figure out, it's far from stock.
First off, it's maxed out at 4MB of ram, always a nice surprise. It's running System 7.1 on a 20MB volume, so clearly it's just the stock 20MB drive right? Well, I'll get to that... I found a program in the control panel called Performer and FPU, and it's a Harris program that lets you set some FPU options I guess. Cool, so it has an FPU upgrade. Then I found a program in the Apple menu called Silver Lining, which gives some info on various system specs... apparently this thing has a Motorola 68030 with a 68882 FPU. Meaning it's not the original 8MHz 68000. Not sure if it's an accelerator card (probably given the Harris utility), an SE/30 motherboard swap, or what yet; haven't tried to open the machine up yet. Also, apparently it has a 170MB Quantum hard drive, but the volume on it is only 20MB. That or it has a 20MB drive and a 170MB drive and the 170 isn't mounted; not sure which...
I'll get some pictures in a bit, but I'm still trying to uncover the mystery of this thing. I should mention it seems to work perfectly; the first time I turned it on after about 5 minutes, right as I went to open a program, the monitor went to just showing a really thin vertical line, and I had to force it off. Powering it up again and it had the same issue, but unplugging it and plugging it back in fixed it. Since then I've been using it for over 30 minutes with no issues 😀 So hopefully it was a loose connection in the monitor cable or something simple like that, because the image looks really crisp and bright and I'd hate for the screen to die.
Oh a funny note as well. Judging from the documents and stuff on here, I'm fairly certain this machine was owned and used by a Baptist preacher. What's a bit scary is within 10 minutes of using the machine I stumbled across somebody (presumably the owner's) personal info, including their phone number and, believe it or not, their fricking social security number 😮 I know we hear this all the flippin time but seriously people, wipe your drives!
Anyways back to trying to uncover this beast's secrets 😁
EDIT: The help menu for the harris program mentions the Performer Pro, which if that is indeed the upgrade this system has, means it has a 32MHz 68030 😳 Holy crap that's a huge upgrade; that makes it on par with my LC550 with the 33MHz 68030 (besides that machine having 36MB of ram that is).
EDIT 2: I'm an idiot; it just has a single 170MB Quantum Lightning hard drive that's formatted with the full size. I was reading "20.5MB on disk" and thought that meant the volume size, but it meant the volume had 20.5MB used out of 170 (or whatever the actual formatted value is).
After I copy off all the programs and games that I want from this machine, I'm going to format it and put System 6.0.8 on it, since I already have a 7.1 machine, and apparently System 6 runs much faster. My favorite game I've found on it so far is I think called StuntCopter, where you use the mouse to control a helicopter. There's a horse-drawn cart full of hay that constantly scrolls across the screen, and you have to drop people from the helicopter into the cart. It's quite silly and fun.
EDIT 3: Well the video issue happened to me again, and after waiting awhile it worked again. Googling seems to reveal the most likely culprit is simply a cracked solder joint on J1, pretty easy to repair (well, for someone who knows how to solder at least, aka not me yet). That's comforting; I'll have to give it a go sometime in the near future.
I've been trying to do the trick where you tape over the hole opposite the write-protection on a 1.4MB floppy disk to use it as a 800KB disk, which is extremely unreliable, but the intention was just to use it to put a Zip driver on the SE. Unfortunately I'm not having any luck; the SE and LC550 can both successfully format a disk, but neither can read one formatted by the other. I've tried several disks. Probably just the way it goes when you're trying to use an already iffy method with old used diskettes and weak, worn drives. I'll have to pick up some 800KB (I think they're the same as 720KB PC disks) disks off of ebay or something, or maybe see if somebody at my dad's work has some. Also gonna have to grab an Appletalk setup once I do more research and find out what I actually need for that, because then I could go SE<>LC550 via Appletalk, and LC550<>G3 or G4 MDD via ethernet, hopefully eliminating the need for disks.
PCs, Macs, old and new... too much stuff.