Classic, Mac!
Not a Macintosh Classic, just a classic Mac. It’s the Macintosh SE! My favorite Mac just from an aesthetics point of view is the Classic, but the SE is close enough, more or less. I could never find a Classic for a decent price. Anyway, the IRC client Wallops had a new release, so out went the Atari and up came this thing for some tests. I posted about the last computer on the desk, so why not again for this one? [Edit: Haha, well for one reason, I already summed up this computer in the very first blog post! Eh, whatever..] Let me see how much I can remember about it [and probably (definitely) repeat some stuff].
The time period for this is a little hazy.. maybe 2019? The SE/30 that I’ve had since sometime early 2000s wouldn’t start up anymore. Opening it up revealed that it was in definite need of a recap. So, of course while perusing CraigsList one morning, seeing a listing for the SE asking $99, I couldn’t pass it up!
Seller guy had me meet him at his storage facility way across town. He may have told me what work he had done to the Mac, but I don’t remember, and probably wasn’t paying attention with all the distractions there. I brought a keyboard and mouse with me, assuming he didn’t have one since I didn’t see one in the pics of the ad (and he didn’t).
The computer turned on to the icon indicating “no disk”. Not really caring about the HD in it, I’m like “Cool, $99 you say?” He says “You’re gonna buy it like that?” In my head, I was thinking “How else am I going to buy it?” I always wondered what he meant by that.
A BigMessO'Wires floppy emu came into the mix somehow. I don’t remember if I had it before this or if I bought it FOR this.. but, for quite some time it was my storage solution on this thing, attaching to the SmartPort on the back. Then the RaSCSI came out, and I got one of those. Then the BlueSCSI came out, and I got one of those! My BlueSCSI just has the regular Pi Pico, though, not the Pico W (no networking), so RaSCSI it is.
The RaSCSI connects onto a Pi 3B+ which sits in the place of the hard drive, runs all the regular Linux stuff, and is powered by a molex to microUSB pigtail. It emulates a Dynaport SCSI Ethernet adapter, which there are Mac drivers for. There is a web interface that lets you add whatever you want on the SCSI bus, mount CDs, and create/upload disk images. It’s called the PiSCSI these days, by the way.
Being connected via SCSI, I can telnet into it and not worry about it being a cleartext connection. Then I can SSH out from there, or connect to whatever else. It’s a little like having a “Wifi modem” connected via serial, only with much more functionality! One goofy thing I ran into was that the emulated drive wouldn’t come up until something connected to the web interface… so I just stuck a ‘wget’ line in rc.local. This might’ve been fixed with newer firmware.
The SE maxes out at a massive 4 megabytes of RAM. It CAN run System 7.x, but then it’s super long boot times and only being able to run one program at a time. There aren’t that many applications that won’t run on System 6, anyway. As I type that, I’m reminded that the nice BBSing terminal, Black Night, is one of them. That’s ok, NCSA Telnet works fine. That’s what I’m in now, and I even have that Wallops IRC client in the background. I wasn’t able to copy/paste my ASCII BBS ads with all of that running, though. A dialog box complained about there not being enough memory, even trying to copy just one line of text.
Don’t forget to switch to MultiFinder when using System 6!
Tags: macintosh, classy, tags-are-lame