The Macintosh SE: Classic Computing

The Macintosh SE was the first computer with a hard drive. It was made in 1987 and this computer came with an optional 20 megabyte hard drive or two 800k floppy disk drives. This computer made the hard drive popular and is arguably one of the greatest computers Apple ever made.

It looks a lot like the original Apple Macintosh but it did have a few changes to it's design and there of course the addition of an additional hard drive or floppy drive. The original Macintosh SE had only one megabyte of ram, this was expandable to four megabytes. It had a Motorola 68000 processor running at 8 MHz. Amazing how far computers have come these days isn't it?

The Macintosh SE also had a PDS slot that you could use for an expansion card. It originally sold for $3499 dollars, more then most computers are sold for these days. I still have one of these 22 years later and it still works great and is used for word processing and networking. You can buy an ethernet card and put in a much larger hard drive, however the Macintosh SE was not as expandable as the Macintosh SE/30 which can be expanded up to 128 megabytes of ram and as big a hard drive as you can find. It will also even run OS 8.1. The regular Macintosh SE will run up to system 7.5.5.

It was a great little computer with it's 9 inch black and white screen, and it wasn't that hard to move around. It even lending its cousin the iMac a lot of it's all on one design. The desktop was very customizable and games like Chessmaster,Spellbound and SimEarth could be run on as well as many more games for this system. It can be hooked up to a printer or external monitor, and Claris Works 1.0 is still a great program for word processing and spread sheets.

The Macintosh SE sells for about twenty dollars on Ebay, maybe more or less depending on the seller. You could probably just find one free somewhere at a garage sale for five dollars or less, and it is still a useful computer for word processing and other simple task. It wouldn't be much more then a glorified type writer,but it is also a great piece of history and a testament to how far we as a people have come, as well as our technological advances.