Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/06/website-hosted-on-1989-macinto.html
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The SE/30 was a high water mark for the all in one classic Macs. I still have one!
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We ran a number of productions using these wee-screened beasts. They were great.
Also - re: “special modifications”
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“We took an originally $4000 machine and upgraded it with what would have been $4,000,000 in parts at the time.”
Is it really even the same machine?
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One thing I miss about the 68k Macs - the Programmer’s Key. No matter what you were doing, press a button on the case and boom, you’re in the debugger. Good times!
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Theseus’ Computer
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I made a replacement one for my Mac 512K that you can 3D print: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2994087
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The crazy thing is that a 4,000MB SSD is probably a USB thumb drive/SD card or something like that instead of a real SSD. Much much slower than a proper SSD, but still way faster than the spinning rust it shipped with.
Heck, that’s still pretty small even for a thumb drive. Storage capacities have improved by five orders of magnitude in the 20 years since that machine was new. That’s a staggering amount of change over a single human generation.
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Not to rain on his parade, but web hosting is not that hard today. I can count half a dozen devices I own that cost under $50 that have web servers built in just because it is cheaper than a real user interface. Heck smart lightbulbs have web servers.
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No doubt there are more impressive achievements in hosting, but it’s still worthwhile to see people keeping this old hardware working and useful.
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Seems he has been slashdotted. Or boingboinged?? The server is currently down.
That server is running off of a C64. It takes a while to stream the data from the notoriously slow 1541 disk drive at 150bps.
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The SE/30 is definitely the best B&W Mac ever made. My next door neighbor had one and how I coveted it. I had a hand me down Mac Plus and was always jealous at how fast and capable his computer was.
In the late 1990s I upgraded my parents old SE to an SE/30 motherboard. Attaching a color monitor to it was magical.
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I’m guessing that Woz would say ‘yes’ and Jobs would not. And I mean on philosophical grounds related to end-user tinkering; not just because only one of them is alive enough to say anything.
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And Apple knew it, too. The price jump from the SE to the SE/30 was a pretty big leap.
I worked in the university bookstore selling Mac machines in the late 80s/early 90s, and the SE/30 was this point somewhere out in the middle between the SE’s and the Mac II line, which was further out of reach for most students, even with the significant educational discount. (Though not out of reach on those Saturday shifts, where I would see the well-off parents come in, flip out their AmEx gold card and buy their 18 year old freshman the top-of-the-line everything Mac, even if Timmy or Ashley were a recreation major and didn’t need all that.)
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Is the website hosted on a Newton still up? This reminded me that indeed, at one time, that was a thing as well.
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Yes, it says on the modifications page that it’s an SD card in a SCSI2SD interface.
Not sure whether the SD card, the SCSI interface or the motherboard would be the bottleneck there.
Assuming a non-garbage SD card is being used(and there is some real trash out there; but this sort of labor-of-love project doesn’t seem like the place where you’d try to save $10 by reusing the dodgy SD card that came from ebay with a false size printed on it and shows up about half the time when plugged in), the spec sheet for the SCSI2SD suggests that it would be the SCSI interface:
Versions 5, 5.1; and 5.5 specify SD or microSD via SPI (“3MB/s theoretical maximum”) while version 6 is presumably using a full SD interface for “up to 20MB/s”.
On the SCSI side, v5 and 5.1 both say “Up to 2.6MB/s read, 2.3MB/s write (1.1MB/s on most older SCSI hosts)”, v5.5 just says " Up to 1MB/s"; and v6 adds FAST10 synchronous transfers for “Up to 10MB/s”.
I assume it is deliberate on the part of the SCSI2SD’s designer that the SD interface on all models is a bit faster than the SCSI one, to avoid bottlenecking(moving to solid state storage should never feel like a downgrade); but there’s also just the fact that SCSI, while super-classy back when the unwashed were contending with IDE or worse, like brutals, simply wasn’t all that fast by contemporary standards, it compared pretty well with alternatives of the time; and the smaller and more cost sensitive computers, not really intended to support a full bus of the fastest peripherals available(someone has probably got an SE/30 rocking a drive shelf just because they can; but that’s not really what they were designed for), probably don’t hit the theoretical maximums of their SCSI versions in any case.
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I hope all the protocol stack is fairly modern. There have been some nasty exploits over the decades.
