2001.Nov.1 I've been wanting a second computer at home, something for the kids to use when I'm on the 'Big Iron'. Something for me when my wife is using the main computer. So when I saw a compact Mac on sale at I yard sale I had to check it out. Fifteen dollars? seemed ok to me. I asked if it had software and was told that it did, but I should have asked for any diskettes. Should have tried booting it as well.
Anyway, I paid for it and loaded in the car. It was a smart looking Macintosh SE, in good shape for being around 13 years old. When I got home I started to wonder. Was this such a good deal? I could have picked up a 486 or perhaps a low end Pentium for about the same price. But it was a small, portable unit. I could carry it upstairs and work on the kitchen table on cold winter nights when I'd rather be around people than in the cold basement. I hooked everything up, noticed that it had a hard drive, 800K floppy, and 1 MEG of RAM. Then came the moment of truth. Would it boot? I flipped the switch. The built in screen came on, seemed just fine. The mouse pointer appeared and I could move it with the mouse. Happy Mac appears, looks good so far. Then it went back to the blank screen with the mouse pointer, then Happy Mac is back again. Hmm, not too good. It looked to be mostly working, just some software issues that a new System would probably correct. That's where I started to remember about the Macintosh.
The floppy drive is incompatible!
Yes, to get a little more space on a simple (double density mind you) 3.5" floppy disk they played around with the speed. Slower towards the center and faster on the outside. My PC just could not do anything like that. I was stumped!
I wound up buying a Mac IIcx and downloading system disk images from Apple. To fix the SE I had to remove the hard drive and put it into the IIcx. After I had the system installed on it I put it back in the SE and was finally able to boot. Later I learned that while the SE listed the 800K floppy drive on back it actually has the SuperDrive in it and can read HD floppies. I now have the SE upstairs and run MacPascal and xlisp on it. They kids like it for playing Math Rabbit.
It is so nice to have more than one computer in the house. Now when the kids want to use a computer I just point at the IIcx and say, "Sure, use that one!" I've added a CD-ROM to it ($6 for an old Apple 8x SCSI unit) and was suprised at all the older games we have that work on it. It does just fine with Carmen Sandiego and reasonably well with Oregon Trail II and SimFarm. In a pinch I can even run MacLynx or Netscape 3 on it. My Macs are old, but I love them!