Macintosh SE

The Macintosh SE was released by Apple Computer as an all-in-one successor to the Macintosh Plus with additional capacity for expansion as a workhorse computer. The original version was sold from March 1987 to August 1989, when it was offered with upgrade ROMs.

Its design utilized parallel grill bars from the Snow White design language introduced with the Apple IIc. It included the option of an internal hard drive with a floppy drive, or two floppy drives. Each supported a double-density 800KB disk; support for 1.4MB FDHD floppies came later. Additional storage could be added through a SCSI port. Unlike its predecessors, the SE (and Macintosh II) adopted the ADB port for connecting the mouse and keyboard.

Specifications

 * CPU: 7.8336 MHz Motorola 68000
 * Built-in monitor: 9-inch (512x342 pixel) monochrome
 * RAM: 1 MB (expandable to 4 MB) in 4 SIMM slots
 * Hard drive: optional 20 MB or 40 MB hard drive (in top floppy bay)
 * Floppy drives: 1 or 2 internal 800 KB floppies and 1 external floppy (supports 1.4 MB with ROM upgrade)
 * SE slot: a processor direct slot for the 68000 processor

Development
Apple prototyped the SE in transparent plastics to visualize how the components would fit together in a compact package. This also allowed smoke testing to view how air would travel through the system for cooling. According to collector Hap Plain, 20 units were built, with 8 to 10 of them fully functional as bootable systems. Photos of the engineering team were later found hidden within the ROMs.

Revisions
In January 1989, a version with a newly designed logic board was released as the Macintosh SE/30 with a 16 MHz 68030 processor that offered about 4 times the performance of 68000-based compact Macs and support for a new floppy drive high density (FDHD) mechanism, known as the "SuperDrive".

The ROM of the original SE was updated in August 1989, requiring a minimum operating system of System 6.0.3 to support the new FDHD drives. The ROM ugrade was available to existing SE owners, or in new units marked Macintosh SE FDHD . Later that year, they were renamed Macintosh SE SuperDrive . It was discontinued in October 1990, when it was superseded by the Macintosh Classic and LC.

Articles

 * Inside the Macintosh SE at Hardware Secrets (2013-02-06)
 * Original Mac SE Ad Artwork from 1987 by Arnold Kim at MacRumors (2008-09-06)