Author Topic: EEVblog #414 - Apple Macintosh SE Teardown (Read 20939 times)

EEVblog · « **on:** January 22, 2013, 09:51:14 pm »

What's inside a vintage 1988 Apple Macintosh SE?

http://www.nycresistor.com/2012/08/21/ghosts-in-the-rom/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6522
http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheet/motorola/AM26LS32.pdf
http://www.classiccmp.org/rtellason/chipdata/mc3488.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Desktop_Bus
http://amazingdiy.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/am5380pc.pdf

Dave.

Stephenniall · « **Reply #1 on:** January 22, 2013, 11:02:24 pm »

Great !, I had one of these as my first repair, Fitted it with new caps !

Stephen.

JoannaK · « **Reply #2 on:** January 22, 2013, 11:37:18 pm »

What apple (woz actually) was good at was the minimizing the hardware. There was very little extra in them. And since those were solf as high price executive machines the performance was not important, it was a status item.

And yes.. at that time corporations would have not even purchased any computer with good color graphics or audio since that would have been 'a toy or game machine'.

Slothie · « **Reply #3 on:** January 22, 2013, 11:50:31 pm »

I have the same problem as you - I have a dozen or so old computers that I have no practical use for but can't bear to part with. An old Atari 800XL and even older Atari 850 interface I used with a terminal simulator ROM as a terminal for my Linux box, but it was more a novelty than useful - although I did manage to convince one guy I'd ported Linux to the Atari for a couple of minutes before he spotted the 850

mamalala · « **Reply #4 on:** January 22, 2013, 11:56:40 pm »

It's not a reset button on the keyboard, but the power on/off button

Greetings,

Chris

niclatrique · « **Reply #5 on:** January 23, 2013, 12:36:59 am »

Hi Dave !

Have you see that even in '89 Apple was ready for the 2000 year bug ?

Look at the computer 45 seconds from the end, you'll see a date from saturday january 12th of 2013 !
Yeah, back from then, they put four digits year number !

Bill Gates is moneywise ! (Because he didn't !)

See ya,

Nick from eastern Canada ( yes I do speak french !!! )

niclatrique · « **Reply #6 on:** January 23, 2013, 12:39:37 am »

Hi Dave

Have you see that even in '89 Apple was ready for the 2000 year bug ?

Look at the computer 45 seconds from the end, you'll see a date from saturday january 12th of 2013 !
Yeah, back from then, they put four digits year number !

Bill Gates is moneywise ! (Because he didn't !)

See ya,

Nick from eastern Canada ( yes I do speak french !!! )

free_electron · « **Reply #7 on:** January 23, 2013, 12:40:04 am »

Made in USA. In the Fremont plant . There's a video on youtube that shows a full tour of that plant. The building was Later sold to Maxtor and became a Diskdrive assembly line. After Maxtor got borged Solyndra claimed that building before they built their own.

The INS8048 is a ROM version ( not an OTP ) of the 8048 made by NS. Strange they didn't use their own COP4xx series...

Kinda funny. Driven by a Motorola 68K , supported by a Microchip PIC and an Intel CPu in the Keyboard..

Baliszoft · « **Reply #8 on:** January 23, 2013, 12:51:58 am »

Ridiculously slow. I am wondering how apple survived at all. Compare it to the commodore amiga 500 for example. Same era.

Alana · « **Reply #9 on:** January 23, 2013, 01:10:42 am »

That old SimCity... i'd leave this unit just for this game :d Actually my first PC game, about 1994.

krivx · « **Reply #10 on:** January 23, 2013, 01:48:39 am »

Quote from: Baliszoft on January 23, 2013, 12:51:58 am

Ridiculously slow. I am wondering how apple survived at all. Compare it to the commodore amiga 500 for example. Same era.

There is a huge difference in power between the two but I don't know if it's really fair to compare them - we're talking Jan '84 for the Macintosh and Oct '87 for the A500. However, the Commodore 64 came out two years before the Mac and Geos was released in '86 which had many of the features of the MacOS, despite running on an 8bit CPU.

EEVblog · « **Reply #11 on:** January 23, 2013, 01:50:12 am »

I have a quick 4 minute follow-up video showing the developers photos easter egg.
Alternate channel material or main channel?

Dave.

JoannaK · « **Reply #12 on:** January 23, 2013, 02:03:38 am »

The A500 was not the first Amiga model. The Amiga 1000 was released at 1985 and it had allmost identical hardware than later A500.

Most difference between A1000 and A500 was on chipset refinement (=cost cutting) and the OS updates. But the 4 channel digital audio, 640*512 (pal) color screen with dedicated hardware acceleration (blitter, line draw etc) all were at earlier 1985 machine.

And it even had 2 button mouse

I just wonder what I shoud do with my A1000, and my original C64 and...

SeanB · « **Reply #13 on:** January 23, 2013, 04:51:15 am »

Got the original in the basement.

edy · « **Reply #14 on:** January 23, 2013, 05:14:41 am »

Nice teardown! I have an even older Mac Plus collecting dust in my parents garage and keep it for nostalgic reasons, as I used to program on those for high school. I remember one year our high school upgraded their Macs and gave all their older machines to us whiz kids.... Thats how I got it. It was like Christmas all over again!

I remember having the same problem finding a torx to open up my Mac and was also surprised at finding the signatures in there printed on the inside of the case. I still have a whole bunch of floppies but who knows if they work anymore.

I also have an Atari 600 XL, my first computer which I learned BASIC on, complete with a cassette drive and a few game cartridge like pacman, moon patrol, etc. I don't have the heart to throw it out. Unfortunately they don't fetch much on ebay and so they will eventually be doomed to the scrap heap. Even my kids would get bored with it unless they get into electronics hacking.

RetroSwim · « **Reply #15 on:** January 23, 2013, 05:16:33 am »

Cool that there's a replacement battery on there too.

So many vintage Macs floating around out there with their original batteries on them, often damaged beyond repair by battery leakage...

EEVblog · « **Reply #16 on:** January 23, 2013, 06:21:25 am »

Quote from: wilfred on January 23, 2013, 03:49:28 am

A link on the main channel. I would have said alternate channel in the absence of the related teardown. It is already a big list of videos to search through. Do you want to make it even bigger without a solid EEVBlog content?

Yep.
Here it is:

Dave.

Mercator · « **Reply #17 on:** January 23, 2013, 08:25:43 am »

Maybe you can get an old dot-matrix printer and a modem for that and use it as some kind of EEVBlog Telefax.
A more modern device could get data from a webpage and send it to the mac via the modem input. A small program would then print everything that comes in via that input and instantly print it. This way you could print the questions during a live show or just display them on the screen.

EEVblog · « **Reply #18 on:** January 23, 2013, 08:43:26 am »

Quote from: Mercator on January 23, 2013, 08:25:43 am

Maybe you can get an old dot-matrix printer and a modem for that and use it as some kind of EEVBlog Telefax.
A more modern device could get data from a webpage and send it to the mac via the modem input. A small program would then print everything that comes in via that input and instantly print it. This way you could print the questions during a live show or just display them on the screen.

I was going to do that with an Arduino, but using the mac interesting...

Dave.

Mercator · « **Reply #19 on:** January 23, 2013, 09:11:32 am »

It would have this old retro telefax feel to it

You could even make a whole new segment (e.g. "The EEVBlog Telefax") where you rip off a page of questions from the dot-matrix printer and answer them. It could be realised by using a sticky forum thread that gets read by an arduino or some other device. This way you could ban spammers or only allow for one question per user and per episode. The others get ignored automatically.

Baliszoft · « **Reply #20 on:** January 23, 2013, 09:44:36 am »

Cant really say anything good about this computer, especially after seeing the easter egg video.
They surely had (have) a giant ego, im wondering how it could fit in the rom. "Stolen from apple computer", hmm. Sounds quite familiar, too.

. Even though the shield with the signatures looks cool, thats another evidence to this. Let me apologize, im an anti apple guy.

nixxon · « **Reply #21 on:** January 23, 2013, 10:07:15 am »

Nice teardown of a semi-vintage Mac

I remember my dad brought home the original Macintosh in december 1984. It had only one floppy drive for a 400KB disk and no hard drive. The disk drive had a really nice motorized eject system. The Mac came with animations showing you how to operate the computer and some of the programs, MacWrite and MacPaint. It also came with a cassette tape that you could play on your WalkMan. If you pressed play simultaneously with the animations, the audio and video was perfectly syncronized.

We even had a spreadsheet program that looked a lot like the later Excel. I remember plotting in all the votes given in the 1985 Eurovision Song Contest (May 4th 1985) and making graphs. As a bonus Norway even won the song contest for the first time.
This original Mac was later upgraded to a Fat Mac. The cost of the upgrade was a small fortune, and we got a nice, aluminium machined sticker with "512k" printed on it.

In '86 we upgraded the dot matrix printer to the LaserWriter which was like a neat looking combat tank. It was a super heavy, super solid and made really crisp 300 DPI printouts. It outlasted many Macs to come and was in daily use for at least 15 years.

After the first Mac and the Fat Mac upgrade we got the SE/30 with a super fast 68030 processor. We had to upgrade this Mac with a 3rd-party expansion card and I remember that the upgrade kit came with a really long L-shaped hex key (not torx) for the two upper case screws.

Then we had the Mac II cx. My girlfriend at the time got a Powerbook 150 and her father a Performa 630. My first own Mac was a hulking Quadra 900 (second hand) that was later replaced by a Quadra 840av (second hand) in the mid 90's. It had a super fast 40 MHz 68040 processor and a 66.7 MHz AT&T 3210 DSP processor. The DSP made it possible to use the silly GeoPort pod to act as a modem to connect to the internet @ up to 28.8 kbps

This computer was nonetheless the fastest Non-PowerPC Mac ever built. I spent a chunk of money upgrading the 840av video memory from 1 MB to 2 MB (giving me "thousands of colors" in high resolution video mode) and the internal RAM from 16 MB to a whopping 48 MB. Favorite game was Cyclone II.

Hmm, maybe I should get the 840av from the basement and fire up Cyclone again...

baljemmett · « **Reply #22 on:** January 23, 2013, 12:47:45 pm »

Quote from: Baliszoft on January 23, 2013, 09:44:36 am

"Stolen from apple computer", hmm. Sounds quite familiar, too. .

Might help to look at that in historical context - Apple v. Franklin being perhaps the most important part thereof.

jnd · « **Reply #23 on:** January 23, 2013, 11:22:15 pm »

I wonder what's the voltage of the backup battery. I have the same in 1990 Metra multimeter and it's used there to store the calibration values in small 256x4 bit CMOS RAM. Manual says it lasts for 5 years. Those West Germany batteries must have been really well built since after nearly 25 years it still holds over 3.8 volts, in both units!

Ferroto · « **Reply #24 on:** January 24, 2013, 03:48:59 am »

When I was a kid my dad had a Macintosh SE in his radio shack. He had a packet radio setup that let him connect to a bulletin board where he and others could share files. Piracy in the pre-internet days O0


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Author Topic: EEVblog #414 - Apple Macintosh SE Teardown (Read 20939 times)

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