January 19, 1989: Apple introduces the Macintosh SE/30, arguably the greatest of the classic compact Macs with black-and-white screens.
When you picture the ideal 1980s Macintosh, this is likely the machine that comes to mind. And for good reason!
The promise of the Mac
As I’ve written before in “Today in Apple history,” even a hard-core Mac fan would admit that the computer’s earliest incarnation proved exciting largely because of what it had the potential to deliver.
Douglas Adams, creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, once observed, “What I (and I think everyone who bought [the Mac] in the early days) fell in love with was not the machine itself, which was ridiculously slow and underpowered, but a romantic idea of the machine. And that romantic idea had to sustain me through the realities of actually working on the 128K Mac.”
The Macintosh SE/30 delivers the goods
Photo: Motorola
Things got considerably better when the Macintosh Plus shipped two years after the original Mac’s 1984 debut. However, it wasn’t until the SE/30 arrived in 1989 that the Mac hit its stride. In everything from the elegance of its operating system to its sheer hardware horsepower, this computer faced few rivals.
The Macintosh SE/30 boasted a 16-MHz Motorola 68030 processor and either a 40MB or 80MB hard drive. It came with a choice of 1MB or 4MB of RAM as standard — which, amazingly, could be expanded up to a whopping 128MB. Oh, and it packed a 1.4MB SuperDrive, too.
But the Mac SE/30 truly showed its strength when System 7 arrived in 1991. At that point, earlier Macs began to look decidedly decrepit.
Apple discontinued the SE/30 that year, but it remained a workhorse of a computer. You could find it in many offices, research labs and homes throughout the first half of the 1990s.
The Macintosh SE/30 in TV and movies
The Mac SE/30 also made several appearances on TV and in the movies. Most notably, it became as the first Mac to appear in Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment in the early seasons of Seinfeld. (Later it got replaced with a PowerBook Duo and then a Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh.)
Do you remember the Macintosh SE/30? Leave your comments below.
Mac SE/30 specs source: EveryMac
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
15 responses to “Today in Apple history: Macintosh SE/30 makes good on Mac’s promise”
It was a great machine. Adams’ comment is a bit off, because – at the time – it wasn’t underpowered and slow. By the standards of even a couple of years later, everything then was underpowered and slow.
When the G5 tower was introduced, Apple ran a commercial featuring the machine surrounded by a protecting ring of army tanks because its single core 1 GHz processor was so fast that it put Apple in violation of outdated federal laws about exporting super computer technology to foreign countries.
By our norms, anything older than last year is underpowered and slow.
The writing didn’t make it as clear as it could, but the comment about being “underpowered and slow” was in reference to the 128K Mac.
The quote does mention the 128K Mac. My point was trying to get across that it took the Mac a few years to really come into its own!
This machine had a floating point co-processor, a PDS expansion slot that could drive a second *color* monitor, a fairly “beefy” internal hard drive (for its day) and in 1995, could still out-perform a 120MHz IBM PC running Windows 95. The SE/30 was the longest lasting Mac I’ve ever had, from 1989 to 1997. In those years, I was a *serious* Mac programmer—everything from desk accessories, to every resource type, to full blown applications. Loved that machine inside and out.
I had a video card in that PDS expansion slot with a 13″ color monitor attached. That slot really expanded the usefulness of the machine for people doing graphics and/or music. Being able to have more screen real estate was a big deal for those things. I also remember that if no external monitor was hooked up, the graphics card actually turned the built-in B&W display into a 256 grayscale display. That was pretty cool too. A truly great machine that was ahead of its time.
Great machine — and my third Mac (after Fat Mac and Mac SE). I even had a video card installed and added a Sony 13″ color monitor (although finding a right video cable was far more difficult than I had imagined.. something about sync on green thing?) I used it from 1990 to 1993 until I exchanged it with a pizza box called LC 475 .
I still have a working SE/30 with Flying Toasters and Aldis Pagemaker running. It isn’t useful for anything but it makes a great conversation piece. I have the carrying bag for it too.
Ah, Flying Toasters! Thanks for the reminder.
The Talkong Moose would approve… “Your eyelids are getting heavy…”
We had the SE, which we ended up returning because of its high pitched fan. A shame as it was a marvelous machine.
HyperCard by Bill Atkinson and Switcher by Hertzfeld were decades ahead of their time!
Like others, disagree with Doug Adams on the Macs being underpowered– and with the thesis that it was the “potential” that we fell in love with. No, it was the magic itself– from MacPaint to MacWrite (or WriteNow); from the Talking Moose and Tour disks with their wry sensibility (tapping hats and rabbits jumping out or doves flying through the city) to Dark Castle and HyperCard, from the menu interface to WYSIWYG. It was all there in an incredibly wonderful, inviting, engaging platform,
Even the 3 1/2 disks were an amazing innovation — no more floppies getting bent out of shape.
Loved this machine back in the day. Mine in upstairs in my closest in full working order. I boot it up about once a year.
It was my first Mac, running a MIDI studio. Looking at it still takes my breath away!
I loved my SE/30, especially after having had an original 128K Mac and an SE. But it was the Iici (later with an upgraded 040 processor) that I fell in love with. Still my favorite Mac of all. And, discounting Internet connectivity, System 7 on the Iici was the best OS user experience I’ve ever had. I miss those days!
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I bought my SE/30 in 1989 for my architecture thesis. Found out right away that the original 1 MB of RAM was wholly inadequate and spent $500 for another meg of aftermarket RAM. Then I was very happy!
One note: although it was theoretically capable of upgrading to 128 MB of RAM, the most it could handle originally “out of the box” was 8 MB. To go higher you needed a software patch that Apple declined to provide until a consumer lawsuit. The highest I ever went was 16MB, which was awesome at the time.
The expansion slot let me add a 15″ portrait display, which was also great.
My first Mac! Purchased across two credit cards over the phone from some NYC reseller.
At the time, Apple gave other Macs with the ‘030 processor an ‘x’ suffix (IIcx, IIfx). Hmm wonder why they didn’t do that here.