“We’re all pretty familiar with how good Apple Genius Bar staffers can be at fixing issues with the latest products out of Cupertino, but what about those Apple products that are as old — or older — than most of the Geniuses?” Steven Sande reports for Apple World Today.
“Ewen Rankin, a pro photographer/videographer from Birmingham, England who also happens to be the podcaster behind The Mac Show on The British Tech Network, was able to find out recently with a very special 30-year-old Mac SE,” Sande reports. “Ewen’s Mac SE has a special pedigree — it is one of five prototypes made by Apple in California for development purposes, then shipped in 1987 to Apple’s Stockley Park offices in the UK for use by UK-based developers.”
Sande reports, “Ewen said, ‘I could have tried myself but I thought it was more fun to put Apple to the test and see if they were willing to try and help the 30 year old machine come back to life…and they did.'”
Read more, and see the photos, in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ooh, boy, now we’re dreaming of taking one of our Macintosh 128K units to the local Apple Store! (Except, they still work perfectly – 33 years later!!!) Look at that SE – two internal floppies – what a luxury!
I have one! And a cube too!
One correction…not a prototype though.
Mine still words, as does my Mac Plus.
Those were exciting days. MacWrite. MacPaint. Microsoft Excel (everyone still liked Microsoft back then – right before Bill knifed Steve in the back with Windows). Lotus Jazz (so much promise as the 1,2,3 replacement – so much disappointment at the implementation). Pascal runtime editor (whoa, I could draw lines on the screen).
BTW, owner of the original 128K Mac purchased at university (and yea I upgraded to 512K when Apple offered the memory upgrade). I don’t think I have that computer and more. But I still have my nonfunctional next generation Mac plus sitting in the garage.
Good memories, there. I had a 128k Mac, too, 3rd party upgrade to 512k, not the official Apple Fat Mac upgrade – mine didn’t come with the double sided floppy. Ah, the memories. 🙂
I wish that I had kept the Apple III that my sister gave to me. I have to imagine that those are fairly rare these days, since they never were that popular.
The Apple III was an awesome machine. I sold one to a writer the day they came out.
None of the photos show the Mac open, probably because you needed a special long/thin hex head screwdriver to reach the screws. The screen looks very nice for a such an old CRT. I think there are specialty kits for replacing SCSI drive with an SD card or compact flash.
I believe it was torx, not hex
Yeah, it was a torx bit. There were no SD cards or compact flash back then.
It is cool, but honestly nothing special to see here.
I bet half the people that post to this forum have a functional old Mac buried in storage. There are millions of them out there. People are extremely passionate about their old Apple technology. It’s difficult to part with.
Having worked at a service center for 5 1/2 years (company in business since 1979). I would see machines like this brought in for recycle every couple months. People always thought they might be worth big money, but we dealt with them often (for recycle purposes).
We’ve had clients that wanted old data transferred to new medium and we always did our best to accommodate their needs. It’s difficult to repair old machines in a modern service center. You just can’t get the parts from Apple.
Good on Apple for helping the guy out, but to be honest he knew before he even went in that it was more of a social experiment than a true customer service request.
Pffft….
I wonder if they could help me bring my Apple iI back to life? (GS still works, though.)
An Apple II, a PD and a Mac SE walk into a (Genius) bar . . .
The SE/30 was the best – small, fast, great server.
Back in 2002 or so, a large client was pulled into court and they had to gather all computer records for a department. They looked in storage and to their surprise found a then 13 year old Mac IIci. They asked me to look at it and pull everything off the hard drive.
At the time I had a PowerBook G3.
So I went to my past equipment and got my old PowerBook 1400cs that had LocalTalk on it and SCSI and was Target mode compatible.
The Mac Iici actually booted up. I hooked up the PowerBook 1400cs via LocalTalk and turned on sharing. Copied the 80MB drive to the laptop. Then put the laptop into target mode and plugged in the SCSI to the PowerBook G3. Fairly easy if ya got certain Macs.
I’ve bought mine in Feb. of 1984. Still have it with the original box and the special carrying case you could buy.
Yes!, I was just starting to work at the accounting firm KPMG (Peat Marwick at that time) and because the Mac was the most portable computer at that time, they made a big investment in Macs. This was the very beginning of using computers in the auditing process. KPMG would go on and use Mac’s for the next 10 years, before transitioning to PC’s to save money and make it easier to plug into their clients data. The early Macs were great but trying to keep track of floppy disks for data and programs was a nightmare.
Those first SE’s were a dream. We started with SE20’s and thankfully Apple quickly upgraded the hard drive to 30megs. That was a wonderfully portable powerful machine. Our clients were always quite interested in how we used them, and frankly they were quite jealous that they couldn’t use such a fun and easy to use computer at their firms.
There was no question at that time, the corporate IT doors were firmly closed to anything with an Apple Logo.
One of the best uses for those old machines was as a network monitor. If you properly set up a Plus or II or IIcx or IIci with System 6, you could have a completely unassailable network monitor. You couldn’t backdoor it without crashing it. You set it up with a single process running that monitored the network. None of this multiprocessing crap that allowed backdoor processes. No getting it to run code in some attempt at an overflow. Nearly 100% bulletproof.
Yes, in the grand scheme of things they were not robust processing machines, but back in that day I never found a network monitoring and recording system that was so nearly 100% bulletproof with a very simple setup — and maintenance took even less time and effort.
My first Mac was a Powerbook 170. Loved that machine. Went all over the world with me (people in other countries like Romania fell in love with it). The built-in trackball was my favorite and still is to this day, you just can’t get one built-in anymore. Can’t stand the now standard built-in touchpads.
I had a PowerBook 100, the very first PowerBook! Believe it or not it had a lead/acid battery!
I think the 170 did too. No issues though.
TWO floppy drives are for PRO users.
today’s ‘despise pros’ fashionista Apple design team would have AXED the thought: one floppy is more than enough and gives it a more elegant ‘thinner’ look….
The SE would also have existed at 128 K for 4 years without an update and no drop in Price.
On a side note, the 128K Mac never suffered from stiction. 8-P
When we ran into a stubborn drive, while powering it up, we gave it a good whack on the side of one long edge corner, with the butt end of a screwdriver. It wound spin up. It was a good idea to back up or copy off your data before shutting it off again. The thing is, you never know when the drive would get stuck again.
The Genius Bar visit is certainly epic, but alas the situation is short lived. No replacement parts and the problem will return.
A very clean beautiful machine.
Pop in a 68030 accelerator card and the additional ram… and it’s a screamer!
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