{"id":25166,"date":"2020-07-10T23:14:45","date_gmt":"2020-07-11T03:14:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=25166"},"modified":"2020-07-10T23:14:45","modified_gmt":"2020-07-11T03:14:45","slug":"macintosh-se-health-check","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=25166","title":{"rendered":"Macintosh SE Health Check"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I had my dear old Macintosh SE out for a health check as I slowly extract my vintage computer collection from the (unconditioned) place I’ve been keeping it at my parents house to the basement of the place I’m renting. It had a couple interesting findings that seem worth putting online, including another floppy drive rebuild and a slightly elaborate fan replacement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

This particular machine is an early M5010 (Shipped with dual 800k floppy drive, 1MB of ram, squirrel cage fan; If I’m interpreting right the S\/N indicates 9th week 1987) SE. I’m rather attached to it, but not because it’s particularly pristine (it’s not), because it’s convenient (800k floppy controller is a significant liability vs. 1.44), or for any long history. It was a yardsale find in the early 2000s rather than a machine I owned when it was relevant; I think I like it so much because it’s very close to my own age. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has, over the years, been maxed out without doing anything grossly period-incorrect; 4 whole MB of RAM, an 80MB SCSI hard drive 1<\/a><\/sup> installed on its side wrapped in a piece of insulating paper in the spot beside the drive cage and below the CRT where many SEs had a HDD wedged, and the soldered-in PRAM battery has been clipped out to prevent the typical murder\/suicide situations. One of these days I’ll get around to installing a holder, but I don’t really care that it doesn’t save settings. Sadly, it also had some broken fan blades in the squirrel-cage that made it rattle horribly, so it had been disabled and ran fanless for a few … decades… until I got around to grafting a 65mm in there (see below).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think the primary thing I’ve done with the SE is play with MacMinix, which I installed sometime in the early 2000s from the 1.5.10.7 image for HDD based installs that appears to be the only version on the modern net. I have never seen or heard of extant copies of the 8x800K floppy distribution with manual ( 0-13-585050-9, $169 at the time) the documentation and period sources talk about, but would really like to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve actually learned useful things about how UNIXes are put together from looking at Macminx 1.5; it’s a slightly feeble V7-like with almost full source, and was designed as an educational tool (MINIX 1\/2 exists as a companion to Andrew S. Tanenbaum’s “Operating Systems: Design and Implementation” textbook), so it looks more or less like a “normal” UNIX, but is incredibly simple and easy to poke through if you want to figure out how something is fundamentally done. One of these days I’ll get around to wrestling the online man pages 2<\/a><\/sup> and a few other well-known aftermarket improvements into the MacMinix image(s).
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