[NTLK] Off Topic: Macintosh SE/30 - to buy or not to buy?

James Fraser wheresthatistanbul-newtontalk at yahoo.com
Fri Sep 7 17:15:15 EDT 2012


Hello,

--- On Fri, 9/7/12, William Maloney <william.maloney.09 at cnu.edu> wrote:

> 2.) Assuming this is a Macintosh SE/30 Plus, would it be able to read and >write to Windoze Discs off the bat? 

Um, is it possible you might be conflating the SE/30 with the earlier Mac SE FDHD? [scratches head]  

I ask because I'm not familiar with the "SE/30 Plus" myself.  I am, however, somewhat overly familiar with the Mac SE FDHD that Apple cunningly introduced in the last year or so of the Mac SE's three-year-plus production run.   

Alas, the introduction of the newer model floppy drive into the old familiar form factor of the SE pretty much guaranteed endless confusion (think Father's Day in Scotland).  If I recall correctly, Apple didn't actually label all of the newer SE's as having FDHD drives, with some of the ones late in the production run simply being labeled "Macintosh SE".  Any roads, the ones that -did- bear the FDHD: 

http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/collection/articlepics/se/snap10.jpg

or SuperDrive:

http://tinyurl.com/cljxkhw

...logo did so in relatively small, easily-overlooked type (note how the "Macintosh SE" dwarfs the "FDHD" logo in the first pic and the "SuperDrive" logo in the second).  

This, in turn, meant that certain hapless low-level IT lackeys of the era (naming no names) spent a great deal of their time having to explain to owners of the newer, FDHD-equipped SE's that they couldn't simply trade floppies willy-nilly with owners of the older, Double-Sided/Double-Density drive-equipped machines unless, of course, both parties took care to use only the older, DS/DD floppy disks (the difference between DS/DD disks and the newer DS/HD disks being a concept that required yet further explanation).

SE/30s, on the other hand, had FDHD drives from Day One and there was never any confusion regarding that point at the time.

(Apologies if my suggestion is off-base and further muddies the waters; techno-diarrhoea can do that sometimes.) :/


Best,

James Fraser













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