My Mac SE/30 Part II: First Look

It’s #MARCHintosh, a time for retro-computing enthusiasts to celebrate their passion for classic macs.

In Part I of this series I wrote about how I acquired my first compact mac in September 2020, the highly-coveted titular Macintosh SE/30. I’d only just gotten it out of the shipping package and verified it was indeed as advertised.

My plan is to fully restore this machine inside and out. I want it to work, so I can both play games and write software on it, but I also want it to look like new, like it just rolled off the factory floor.

The first step was to document some “before” photos.

My Macintosh SE/30 (Outside)

Externally the machine is in very good condition. No cracks, breaks, or major scratches on the plastic. It’s a little dirty but that’s to be expected. I gave all the external surfaces a good clean with some isopropyl alcohol and a soft rag.

The included keyboard and mouse were in pretty good shape too:

The mouse has a small but noticeable melted spot, probably from a soldering iron or cigarette. I gave them both a quick wipe down, but they’ll need to be taken apart at some point for a proper clean.

Everything suffers from some definite yellowing, which is a little hard to see in these photos, but it’s not the worst I’ve seen. It’s uneven on the front and top where someone had applied stickers or decals. Overall, the yellowing is more apparent when you place it all side by side with my 8600, which has practically no yellowing at all:

Well that’s the outside, time to open this machine up. I placed a towel underneath so I wouldn’t scratch up the case.

My Macintosh SE/30 (Inside)

To get into these compact macs you need an unusually long Torx T-15 screwdriver, affectionately known as a “Mac Cracker”. Four screws and the case slides right off the back:

At the bottom you can see where the rear ports are attached to the motherboard, and at the top you have the power supply and fan. The white rectangle in the center is actually a little card to protect the circuit board attached to the delicate “yoke” at the back of the monitor.

Turning the machine, on the right-hand side is the “analog board”, the circuitry that drives the monitor. You can see it’s covered by a cardboard sheet with high voltage warnings:

It’s on this board where you can adjust the picture, calibrating the dimensions, brightness, focus, etc. Definitely something I’ll need to look into later.

It seems now would be a good time to remind everyone that CRTs use high-voltage capacitors, which can retain their charge for a long time even after being unplugged. You have to be super careful when dealing with these things. Touch the wrong part and you can kill yourself.

Now, later compact models like this SE/30 should have a “bleeder” resistor to safely drain those capacitors when the machine is turned off. But remember, we’re talking about a 30 year old computer here – no guarantee that resistor is still working.

There is a technique to discharge the capacitors, but it involves getting past the protective insulation to reach the high-voltage parts, and I wasn’t mentally prepared to try that yet. So in the meantime, I just avoided touching anything monitor-related.

Turning the machine 180 degrees, here’s some shots of the inside, where you can see the back of the monitor and some closeups of the top of the analog board:

Everything looks okay for now, but I already know the analog board hasn’t been recapped yet, and that can wait for another day.

Moving away from the analog board, the next thing to grab my attention is the currently not-working hard drive:

It’s a Seagate ST1480N, boasting a whopping 426 MB and manufactured in March 1994. Since stock SE/30s only came with a 40 or 80 MB hard drive (or none at all), and the SE/30 was discontinued in 1991, this is a later upgrade. I don’t have much hope I’ll be able to get it working, but that’s okay, I’m planning on replacing it with my SCSI2SD anyway.

Well, this is pretty much all you can see before actually taking things apart. Stay tuned for Part III, where I start doing just that. 🙂

/jon

Want to read from the beginning? Start at Part I.