I didn’t buy this Macintosh SE when it was new. I didn’t even know what a Mac is at that time. Rather, I received the machine after it was rescued from being thrown away.
It is a solid little machine that had been upgraded to a whopping 2,5MB of RAM and an Ethernet card before I received it. And it is an amazing machine that now happily runs with a 500MB hard which I put into it to replace the original 20MB drive. Thanks to well standardised ports and good engineering by Apple, this drive – which was made many years after the computer – works without problems. Just as the computer will boot from an external SCSI zip drive that was made about 7 years after the machine.
With its Ethernet card it can even connect to the internet and share files with current computers. If the server is running a MacOS version up to X.3, the SE running System 7 can simply ‘see’ shared folders via AppleTalk and access them. Unfortunately Apple broke that feature in MacOS X.4, so things are less convenient today.
The computer can also access the internet. But it requires manual entry of IP addresses. While FTP transfers and Telnet sessions will work without problems, the web browsers that run on such a slow machine without support for colour – say Netscape 1.1 or Mosaic – do not work too well with today’s web.
The machine is now called ‘Nibbler’ and still gets occasional use for the odd games of Dubbelmoral and Stunt Copter or for running some old HyperCard stacks.