Restoration of a Macintosh SE: Part 1 Memories and Memory

Restoration of a Macintosh SE

// Trust me, that is somewhere here.

    

    I just want to preface this, this gets a little Nostalgic at the beginning. If you don't care for the back story you can skip down to the Main Article.

    If I want to get real technical, my obsession for classic Macintoshes dates all the way back to when I was in 1st grade. While every other kid typed away on their iBook G3s and the rainbow of iMacs in our class, I was always the kid running to the Beige Tower we had in the corner. Maybe it was because of the clunking noises, the bigger monitor, the non-puck mouse, or maybe just because I liked looking at it. What ever the reason why, I knew I loved using it. It ran some version MacOS 8, and whenever I think of it I remember it being a Quadra, though that would have been really old for 2004, so it was probably a Performa or PowerMac tower. 

     Being maybe about Eight years old, without a source of income and no way to ever find a Mac in the neighborhood I grew up in, I did what any "normal" kid would do. I set out on a journey with my first computer that I had gotten and loved back in Christmas of 2006 from my father he built, that's a story all on its own. I had managed to Google about some of the software that I used at school and did research into my first steps of my future vintage computer hobby, emulation! I managed to set up Mini vMac and play some of those old games from school, but it wasn't enough. Soon I started messing with old DOS games my father left behind. We had a 166Mhz MMX Pentium in the basement that my father had also built long before I was born that I used to play DOOM and Wolfenstein on, I wish we still had That computer. I remember finding a box of Windows 3.11 5 1/4" floppies with the manual, and bringing the manual to school to read, I got laughed at when I showed it off. However, as I got older, all that wasn't enough. I went through PCs, Laptops, phones, even put CFW on a PSP to run some of the old games I loved. I couldn't tell you how many times I installed Windows 98SE onto different computers I acquired. All which were pretty useable on the web un until about 10 years ago, strange how things change. However, one day, all these years later, the Classic Macs I used oh so long ago, and the lust for my very own Classic Mac struck.

    I can blame it all on this, two years ago the opportunity struck where I could buy this Apple II+ and it was a long battle deserving of it's own, but it single handedly made me switch gears from a Linux Centric view of computing, rekindled my love for the old Apple computers I used so long ago, and drove me to Mac Collecting today. 

    But enough exposition, here is my latest project. The Macintosh SE. I had gotten this in a sad state from a family friend. It looked nice enough, but it wasn't turning on. A problem most Macintoshes of this vintage have. Which was a shame so I set off to bring it back to life. Opening it was a simple enough, it was only held together by 4 T-15 Torx screws and I had the tools due to a brief exploration into being an auto tech. 

 

Once the cover was off and the CRT exposed I promptly discharged it. A long screw driver and alligator clip helped me achieve this. Once inside I noticed a few things wrong with it. First off

 

    All of the cables were disconnected? Whoever was in here before I was I hope that they knew a little bit of what they were doing. Since everything was disconnected, I decided to remove the Logic board.

    Uh Oh?

 

    Things weren't looking good for this poor Mac SE at this point, however I did not give up hope. I noticed that the RAM was missing and the resistor had been cut that allowed larger SIMMs to be put in. Knowing that the older Macintoshes are very particular about the memory they use, I figured that it was probably not the ROM even though a 00000001 Sad Mac calls for an error in the ROM checksum. But where was I going to get RAM to check my theory?

    Then it hit me, I had received a Mac Plus someone was giving away on Reddit. The Mac Plus and SE used the same memory, and it just so happened that this one had a full 4MB. How convenient! Sorry poor Mac Plus, but I will find some new RAM for you, it's actually pretty cheap on eBay.

  

   

    I swapped the RAM very carefully with the strength of "Oh please don't break" on the plastic clips and with careful placement they were in and now for the moment of truth! 

   Wait, no the rear of the tube was also off, so it wouldn't have displayed an image, glad I noticed before turning it back on!

    It actually worked!! I was getting prepared to deal with sourcing a ROM, or modifying an EPROM into it with a ROM image from the internet, But I'm glad that it worked out!

 

    There definitely were still problems with it, like the 20MB SCSI drive was refusing to spin up, but I had the System 6 floppies I had traded an iMac G3 for. Next time we will be going over how I managed to get a failed SCSI drive to work by delidding the drive and doing some unorthodox fixes, and then giving up to replace the drive entirely.

    All this and more in Part 2. Now if you'll excuse me I'm gonna go learn how to wrap text around images in HTML...

~Ian L.