Oh the memories! There was a plastic thingy that clipped onto to the case and stuck through to push the two "programmers" buttons on the board. I remember them being a hard reset and an interrupt button. Very handy while programming. At least if you programmed like I did. I had one of these in college. I added a board that upgraded it to 16MB(?) and attached a "two page" black and white monitor. I wrote my thesis in MacWrite on it. Thanks for a good tear down and some memories.

It amazes me that these still work, booting just like the did over two decades ago.

I haven't heard those sounds in over 20 years. Sent a shiver down my spine.

Yeah, the "20SC" in these old SEs is a MiniScribe 8425SA, made especially for Apple. The 8425 it's based on is an MFM drive, and so it's good for *maybe* 400 kB/s if you're lucky. One of the neat things about this is that it had timer auto-park...if you let it idle long enough, it'd park the heads by itself. Someone further down had mentioned Rodime, and no, they didn't use those here, but Apple did use a Rodime with an odd proprietary interface in the old HD20 external drive (which attached to the floppy port and was very slow, as I understand it).

I still have a specially modified Torx driver in my tool drawer just for vintage Macs: about 20 years ago I cut a regular Torx driver in half and welded a little extension in the middle to make it easy to reach those screws inside the handle.

Oh also, I don't know if anyone has mentioned, but those two tactile switches on the motherboard are a reset switch and a non maskable interrupt switch, aka the "programmer's button." Pressing it brings up a little debugger window, which could be replaced by a program called "macsbug" to give you some powerful debugging tools. If you needed to use those buttons often, you could get a small plastic widget that fit onto the side of the case and reached through the vents to actuate those buttons.

The two tactile switches are the reset and debug buttons. There's a special "programmer's switch" which is a piece of plastic that protrudes through the vents in the side of the case that allows programmers to use them. Theyre used to break into the debugger and reset the 68K.

Hi Dave, the buttons you found is actually a programmer's key, or interrupt button an a reset button! For debugging purposes only, they are reachable from the outside using the programmer's switch.

This is what I love about my audience, someone ALWAYS knows!

I love these vintage teardowns! been wathing these from EEV all day =)

Apple has always been known for their handles on their computers. But even today: The "old" Mac Pro and the "new" Mac Pro have handles, I really appreciate handles and always did so!

THANKS DAVE. Being a vintage computer enthusiast I always enjoy a good teardown like this. In fact, I first found EEVblog 3 years ago when I stumbled on your Tandy 1000 teardown. All the best..

The reset and interrupt switches were on the side -- you snapped a plastic assembly onto the cooling slots on the side which enabled pressing the buttons through the case. The interrupt button launched the built-in disassembler by default ( gave a ">" prompt in a dialog window) but you could install other alternative debug tools as well.

A few details from an old-skool Mac-head (now reformed; I use Ubuntu). The keyboard reset switch had no function on the SE series but was used as a power switch on the Mac II series which had software-controlled latching power supplies. It took advantage of a spare pin in the ADB cables. Interesting note: you could use an S-video cable as a really long ADB cable if you needed. The expansion slot was called NuBus. Adding the card did not require the user to get near the CRT as it fed through the horizontal slot in back. I never saw an SE series machine with a card, but NuBus cards were common in Mac II series machines. I used a Mac IIfx for a few years: its ADB controller chips were in fact two 6502 CPUs! I decided that IIfx meant "II f-ing expensive." It cost $20,000 new with 4MB RAM and an 80MB SCSI hard disk, and a 50MHz 68030 CPU! The two mystery buttons on the side of the mobo are the "programmer's switch". The front one (if memory serves) was a reset button and the other one issued an interrupt so developers could call up a debugger.

Those circuit lines on the PCB are just beautiful. All parallel in mostly one direction, just so cool! Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't feel like modern boards have quite that beautiful style.

these videos are very entertaining even without profound knowledge of electronics. thx for the effort man ;)

One thing I believe should have been mentioned, that the difference in the modem-port and the printer-port were only in the nomenclature. When you added any device to one of those two ports, you had to tell the computer into which port you plugged them in to. Usually you saw the same symbols on the software side as you saw on the back of the computer. I've been asked one too many times, why you couldn't connect a modem to the printer-port, yet YOU CAN ! Also, you could connect a printer to the modem-port, they are both exactly the same !

Loved it. Thanks for that David !

That handle was genuinely useful, and it really was a portable machine. I used to take my SE30 from work to home every night. Just a few cables, keyboard, mouse, voila.

Very buildable, but so much more for the same effort today. Fascinating thanks :)

Worked on the Mac SE/30 back in the early 90s. The trick to taking the case off is to place your hands on the sides and yank it back. Next step was to remove the CRT yoke plate to protect the CRT. A common problem was that the hard drive would get stuck in the park position. This was easily cured by giving the right side of the unit a good slap with the hand, at the height of the floppy drive, and the system would boot up.

Just think, those old retro computers, helped give us the far-better modern computers that we have today.

I just love your channel 😀

I've got a couple vintage computers that I still play on. One of them, a Tandy 1000HX is as old as I am (1987), and still works, with the exception of the RTC chip. Phillips used to make 24 pin packages that would plug in under the BIOS, with the BIOS piggybacking into that, since RTC clocks weren't really a standard feature on PCs at the time, and that's what this machine has. The battery on that chip JUST RECENTLY crapped out after 30 years, and they're rated to last for 10! That's a NASA warranty for you there! Had to dremel into the chip to cut the connections to the two button-cell batteries, and bodge some wires to connect another battery. It works again :D I'm no Apple fanboi either, but I still find the vintage Macs fascinating.

Dave, it is a antique piece. Keep it running and in another 15 years time who knows it will be worth a million dollars :)

The hard drive is a Miniscribe model 8425 (which also existed with the ST506/MFM interface), with stepper motor head actuator. It was a very common drive back in the days and quite a big number of these arrived at today still working or at least in a restorable state. I suggest to desolder the old battery as a lot of them were prone to literally explode and spill acid all over the mainboard and even on the chassis! I saw some months ago a Mac SE/30 with what were the remainings of a Maxell battery, which exploded and its acids corroded badly the mainboard and even the metallic chassis over it until the point it became rusty! Do it as soon as you can to prevent this disaster, I personally put away all the batteries in my old Macs.

i was supposed to finish some smd soldering... but AGAIN, i´m sitting here with a pizza, watching your teardown. sometimes your videos give me the same feeling like taking something apart myself :)

It's amazing watching it all redraw due to memory constraints, especially when moving back to a background window.

0.0078 gigahertz processor. Once upon a time, it was theorised that they couldn't make a processor faster than 500 Mhz. You had to enable big drive support on Widows 95 for hard drives larger than 512 megabytes.

"Hah! Look at this -Davetown! I've got to have a look at davetown!" Last Modified: Jan 22, 2013 Hmm..

Dave, I'm sure you've figured it out but that isn't the original keyboard. Also, the two tactile switches on the board are for reset and interrupt. There's normally a button panel that snaps onto the side of the machine with fingers that reach through the slots in the case to push them.

The expansion slot in these things was the same form factor as the NuBus, continued to be used in 90s macs. I have a rescued SE/30 with a whopping 10 meg ethernet card in it. Actually managed to get it onto the internet with a 10base2 to 10baseT converter! The machine's SCSI drive had died, and some of the 30-pin RAM SIMMS were bad, so I resurrected it with parts stolen from a 386. It now has a 200 MB hard drive and about 32 MB of RAM. wonder how much that would have sold for back in the 80s if such a thing had existed? :-)

24:45 for the startup! Awesome sounds of that Miniscribe! Gotta miss those stepper motor sounds!

Awesome, thanks!

At least as far as the original B&W Macs go, the SE/30 was a beast. It was as fast or, in some configurations, faster than the top-of-the-line Mac II and, although the SE/30 wasn't cheap, it cost a whole lot less than a Mac II. There was one equipped with a 24 bit color graphics card in service in my high school into at least the mid 90s.

The first PC I used. I was on a flight test at Pt Mugu, and writing reports of the flights for GE. We were flying F14s at each other to test an airborne infrared detection system. I flew out to Eglin AFB where we had another flight test going to visit and learn from my boss how to use the Mac (we used VAX systems back at the plant). He said "I'm going golfing - you'll figure it out ." Sure enough, darned easy to use.

great video. a treat!

Hi Dave I would like to see more vintage computers teardown :) love them videos can watch them over and over :) thanks for the great videos.

Awesome tear down, walk down memory lane :-)

This video made me go buy one. There awesome!

I love the sound of that old hard drive.

This brings back memories... Thanks so much... And reading the other comments about debugging - I'd forgotten about the "Even Better Mr Bus Error" extention... :) Those were the days..

Awesome video

The amount of precision required in modern hard drives is absolutely staggering. You could probably count the tracks on that old clunkin' SCSI drive.

Wow this brought back memories of being an Apple authorised repairer.. You look so awkward doing stuff that we did day in and day out ;-) Good stuff.

I had a Mac IIci back in the early '90s. It was made to open up easily for adding expansion cards. The motherboard design was quite clean from what I recall. Running System 7, it could play small Quicktime videos, which I thought was pretty amazing back in the day.

Whoa, an uncle of mine probably had one of these till somewhere around 1998. I was always amazed about how it could tell you that it was starting up with the desktop basically already there, while my 486 was telling me that Windows was loading. By the way, for some reason I got some serious ASMR when he was slowly turning the thing around...

Others have probably made this point in the past, but the button on the top of the keyboard was generally used as a power button for Macs that supported soft power-on. That's why it's set apart from the other keys.

Torx was quite rare back then I believe.

This machine was running slower than usual and using more RAM at the desktop because a previous user turned "Multfinder" on, which was Apple's multitasking environment and allowed multiple applications running simultaneously (using a LOT of disk-swapping). Additionally the FileSaver CDEV (Control Panel Device) slows it down, too. System 6.0.8 is pretty damn stable and pretty snappy for 7.888 MHz. If you want to see slow, try running System 7.5 on an SE or Plus. It takes LITERALLY seven and a half minutes to boot to desktop.

The VLSI chip is the IWM or Integrated Woz Machine. It's a functional equivalent of the original Apple II disk controller card designed by Steve Wozniak, with enhancements to support the Sony 3.5 inch drives. The switches were the Reset and the Programmer's Switch (a manual interrupt basically). There was an external plastic snap-on piece with levers which pressed the actual switches on the board inside the case.

We were still using these for admin staff in 1995 - they were durable units. but a lot of them hit the dumpster when pan and tilt VDUs were made mandatory in the UK. There was an aftermarket mod that pan & tilted the whole unit which might be what that metal plate on the base was to do with. By the time I left they had ethernet cards and a web browser NCSA mosaic on them so they straddle an era when Germany was divided into east and west to the start of the web era. Don't think you mentioned it but there's no eject button for the 3.5" floppy, disk writes were heavily buffered and you were supposed to eject in software (by dragging the floppy icon into the dustbin) If it crashed with a floppy stuck in there you had to poke a paperclip through the pinhole next to the drive to manually eject. I've had these open but never saw the stamped in signatures before - seems like a typical wanky apple thing to do, this was supposed to be affordable model and they're basically sticking the cost of an unneccesary extra manufacturing process on the customer for vanity (could have had it moulded into the inside of the plastic shell for nothing)

Dave, see if you can get your hands on a NeXT computer (no idea how easy that'll be Down Under - or anywhere, really). NeXT were really proud of their hardware and manufacturing (here's their detailed presentation of the motherboard production: watch?v=sT6aphdX0rI ). It's basically the exact same processes as today - just 25 years ago! For the uninformed: NeXT was Steve Jobs's 2nd computer company after he got fired from Apple in 1985. They built advanced high-end UNIX-based workstations, and their OS is the basis for current day Mac OS X. An expensive niche computer to be sure, but lots of advanced stuff in there with tons of impact on current tech (not just Macs). Noteworthy: Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT machine to create the World Wide Web. So yeah, big tip of the hat to NeXT!

an unbelievably beautiful example of well engineered hardware. ram expansion slots, onboard scsi and a hi-res display....the first time I saw the Mac se in action, I remember feeling guilty for wishing that I owned one, instead of my trusty six month old Amiga 500. I noticed that the varta battery hadn't leaked, which isn't bad for a 28-year-old machine. the same type of varta battery (and the same year too) was installed in my (now fully restored) amiga a2000, where the 'kin thing had leaked and 'ate' a hole; the size if a blue whale's sphincter, right through the mainboard. 'Jerry built' was obviously a redundant complement to 'west germany' - even back in '88. ;) ref: "what to do with apple?" clean her up, Dave, and place her in your computer museum - next to the others. amiga, apple, acorn (archimedes), atari - the four A's of legend. best 'geek porn' ever....that is, if there is such a thing? maybe that's an 'exploitable' market niche for those entrepreneurs amongst us..... thanks for posting mate! quality and entertaining content as always.

I love the sound of the hard drive

is it possible to overclock the heck out of it by replacing the timer chip on the main mobo? or wherever the GPU is? (assuming it has one?) I don't know a whole lot about these old machines.

Old Apple stuff always has a clever way to open up that's totally not obvious at first.

All apple keyboards from the Apple II up to and into the USB era had a "Reset" key which was initially tied to an interrupt and used to break into the debugger. It was used by consumers to reset the computer as well (Ctrl+Command+Reset) and once soft power on became big, it was used as the power button up until the iMac when it was changed to the power key and bore the standard power symbol.

On Macintosh computers in the 90s the button behind the main keyboard was the power on button, you'd press it to turn the computer on, but of course the SE has a physical power switch on it. You could keep the SE and use it for basic word processing tasks where you don't need to E-mail documents to people, or you could scour the Internet for games then when your son's a bit older he could play some basic games on it.

"It's upside down, all the electrons are going to fall out" I am going to use that at work now, lol

I love the sound of stepper motor hard drives.

Yep, video of that is on my alternate channel.

Love it, so much i didn't know!

Yes, it's annoying enough difference when I turn my head. Not trivial to fix in post production, just adds annoying extra steps, so mostly I let it fly.

Wow! Great tear-down, thank you! If you want to transform it, it's a fun project to toss in a mini-atx form factor mobo, and replace everything to modern parts, so it looks retro but is actually all modern. Then put an emulator on it. Or altogether different is to tear down a netbook and toss it into there, seeing how the boards are integrated already. Another way to go is to use a raspberry pi.

"None of this optical rubish" cracks me up

Hey Dave - Glanced through the comments and didn't see it mentioned, but that handle/bracket which was blocking your hand getting to the power connector looked like was removable with two screws, letting you get in much closer. As for the custom plate, back in graduate school, it was common to add a custom mount to devices that were parked in spaces where they didn't have a stable foot print, esp. if they were over expensive equipment. That tape could be vibration dampening (since aged).

They had one of these setup as a server in the computer lab at my elementary school when I was young... At the time it was very powerful compared to the other systems hooked up to it, mainly Apple IIGS. Definitely the good old days..

I remember playing on these old machines. Great fun.

I used a lot of these in high school. I got a kick out of the technology back then. We had a whole room full of these on a LAN, sharing a single Laserwriter printer. Only wish they had color screens!

Two tactile switches: Back in the day, a software developer would install an Apple-supplied 2-button plastic switch which reached down to the switched on the motherboard. One button allowed you to drop into a 68k debugger (so you could see where you were in a hung program). The other button forced a system reboot without needed to cycle the power.

If Dave worked at the Apple factory, he'd be too busy taking apart what he was supposed to be putting together!

Lovely! I wrote my bachler in social work on that fantastic machine! At one point, I bought a expansion kit, from 720 to 1.2 Mb diskdrive. And I managed to fill up all 20MB HD! Lovely :-)

God.. I Love that old fashion hard-drive sound!

Without the multifinder enabled and screensaver installed (as well as other addons), the system and finder take up less memory. I remember I had to upgrade to a minimum of 2MB on my SE in order to run the After Dark Star Trek edition screensaver.

Thanks for the video! I have Mac SE.

Interesting video! Little tip for the screen flicker, if you turn your shutter speed down (probably as low as it'll go- 1/30 of a second or so) it will help get rid of the flicker. As well, I had a bit of a giggle at 30:04 when you said circuit simulator lol

yep, we had when I was in elementary school, the computer is placed on a spacial cage that covers the sides and top pf the computer, then the screw bolts things screw into it through the main cage, then that cake is bolted to the table. (those computers were built really tough (handled quite a few textbooks being thrown at them :) )

I really like the old soldermask on this one! Very dark without copper, very green with copper!

Where to find the external hardware needed to connect to this Mac SE 30? I have one in the same conditions like yours, with hundreds of Word and Excel files saved on its Hard Disk. My problem is to transfer theses files to a modern Mac that can convert them into a new Mac format, and then convert/transfer them in a second step into a windows-based machine. Could you help through providing the names of shops/firms where I can buy the required external hardware? Thank you.

What are those yellow ic's on the main board for ?

I'd wager that custom base plate was part of a wall-mounting kit. Those "feet" probably slotted into a panel on an arm. Kind of surprised they stuck it on there like that, because IIRC Macs of that vintage brought in air through the bottom of the case.

Guessing someone already told you the small switches on the SE motherboard were "programmer's switches" - one did a hard-reset of the computer (sort of like Control-Alt-Delete) and the other would break the computer into the low-level, built-in debugger (monitor). An optional plastic switch faceplate (with two long finger-like extensions) would mount externally and allow the programmer access to those switches.

Some rather amusing/infuriating problems on these old MACs: 1> you had to drag the floppy to the trashcan to eject it. This meant that when it crashed you couldn't get your floppy back. 2> it used to give some very unhelpful error messages such as "there was an error, because there was an error".

ive got one of these but its the SE FDHD. And i have a Classic as well. Your's works like they all seem to. Both of mine were in pretty good working shape when i woke them from lengthy storage periods. i had to clean the pins on a one of the rom chips and had to reflow the solder on the J1 connector for the CRT on the SE but thats been it.

pieces of art!

That metal plate on the bottom is a more secure option for mounting in things like computer labs. Those feet fit into locking rails on the table, so the thing can't be picked up at all

DIP packs are usually just resistors going cross the package, eg pin 1 to pin max. Occasionally it is useful that all the resistors are on the same thick film and much closer to each other than to the nominal value, eg. resistor ladders in ADC circuits.

I guess I was very privalaged in 1988 when my dad got a Commodore Amiga 2000. Comparatively it was years ahead of Apple and had a much more graphic GUI as well (Amiga Woekbench). I used the Amiga for at least 10 years. Only when Nvidia came out with their TNT chip and Creative released the Soundblaster Live! soundcard the Amiga became properly old. But that is 10 years later... a striking long useful life for a computer.

Love the racket from those old stepper-motor-actuactor drives..

They put the switch on the back presumably as a safeguard for your unsaved work. With the power switch furthest away from the user and out of sight, it's less likely that the switch will be tripped unintentionally by the user.

The switches are NMI and reset - a plastic panel to use them was either around $5 or came with most programming languages. All the things in the Apple menu are added to the system, as well as the icons that show up on the bottom. It will run much faster if you clean them up. It makes the system several times bigger and slower. People where just as bad then about bogging their system down with silly add-ons. HyperCard is probably on there, and is a really awesome and useful programme.

Dave, watching this video remind me to ask you, can you post a video on how do you discharge a CRT? Thanks.

Most of - if not all of - the applications for mac se are abandonware, and at places like macintoshgarden org you could search for products from 1987-1990 and perhaps copy to an ancient floppy some more applications for demonstration or trials. There is an application there called 'Mac SE Pict' that runs on system 6 and if you run it on the SE will give a slideshow of the hidden pictures written on the roms!

Commodore proudly named its chips (MOS xxxxx) because they made them. MOS Tech wasn't marketing at all, it was a real IC maker and CBM had real logic designers.

About that stuck on plate on the bottom: The feet look like they would slot into some sort of mount, like to make sure you couldn't pick it up, or if it were on some sort of stand or something, it couldn't tip over.

Oh wow ! I remember that mac start-up noise. cheers

it felt like I went around the world looking at all these chips and components.

i love that hdd sound

Boots faster than a lot of new windows machines. LOL I personallly didnt think it was that slow. When you consider what it was doing and that it is running at 7mHz. It's actually pretty amazing... They were amazing.. It's why they sold so many of them. How many new computers will still work in 27 years....LOL... Not many. They did build good hardware. Surprized that battery had not gone bad. Maybe it was replaced at some point. Be interesting to see if they came with the battery made in Germany.