This vintage upgrade made the Mac SE into a MONSTER!

[@buddhavskungfu]

"Maybe it needed a moment to sort itself out." I just love the temperament of old machines and cars.

[@tech34756]

A friend told me a joke once. A plumber, an electrician and an IT guy were in a van when it broke down. The plumber thought it was the fuel line, the electrician thought it was the wiring whilst the IT guy said 'give it a few minutes and it will fix itself'.

[@getermoura]

Just few moments to charge up those dry capacitors

[@buddhavskungfu]

@@tech34756 I’m saving that one!

[@adventureoflinkmk2]

Either that or if it had a cpu upgrade it needed a reset to recognize the new cpu

[@tech34756]

@@adventureoflinkmk2 According to one pinout diagram, the connector does have the reset line on it so the expansion card should be able to reset the system itself.

[@tarstarkusz]

Saying 'not all programs could utilize a math co-processor' is the understatement of the century. Very few pieces of software could utilize a math co-processor. They were incredibly rare. Very few people used them so there was little reason to support them. Spreadsheets were the only software that used them generally speaking.

[@dennisfahey2379]

Spreadsheets - in retrospect - were indeed the first Killer App. Until Visicalc the business market was mini/mainframe and for businesses over 250 employees. That made a "personal" computer valuable. And I think, but this is an opinion I cannot back with fact, it also had the advantage of making PC's appeal to director level and above management - the people who could actually budget a $8000 tool. Prior to that - for text only PC's - the only business app was for word processing and tiny databases that fit on a floppy. Very hard to justify the expense when a typewriter and bottle of whiteout were much cheaper. Hard drives and servicable memory space (Lotus Intel Microsoft LIM memory expansion) then allowed the device to extend its reach. The Mac's 68000 had enough horsepower to do a GUI and also support both these critical features. Its focus on Desktop Publishing sort of missed the mark for the business market at first which allowed the comparatively weaker - but cheaper - IBM PC (and clones) to dwarf its volumes.

[@clumaster]

CAD programs like Autocad back then would also utilize the Math Co-Processor i remember showing off the difference in 2 identical 386 machines, one with a math co-pro and one without, what the speed difference was in rendering. i had it rendering a wire-frame drawing of a fighter jet, the math co-pro had it done in under 3 minutes and the one without to over 15 minutes to render.

[@tarstarkusz]

@@dennisfahey2379 You would be surprised at how big these spreadsheets can get. This was basically why they created LIM EMS. I worked for an accounting firm that did modeling with spreadsheets many megabytes in size. When I first started there in the early 90s, they were retiring a bunch of old 80s PCs and it was my job to retire them. Most were XT class, nearly all had large amounts of EMS memory installed. We're talking full length cards loaded with DIP memory chips. When it made sense, they would spend money. (There was probably 10 million plus dollars in that room worth of RAM when new) But when it didn't, they refused. That's why they were just retiring these machines, despite it being 1994. They figured these machines had the RAM and updating would not significantly improve throughput because a lot of the calculations were done overnight. If it does the calculations in 3 hours instead of 8 or 9 hours overnight, it's still going to be overnight because nobody is going to sit around for 3 hours at 5pm to see what the outcome is going to be.

[@tarstarkusz]

@@clumaster There were certainly some applications that benefited greatly. But these were not apps in widespread use. I have absolutely no idea why anyone today would put a math co-processor in a 30 year old computer.

[@robwebnoid5763]

​@@dennisfahey2379 ... The funny thing in retrospect was that in the mid 1980's, I used actual paper spreadsheets, because I did the bookkeeping for a medical clinic, & I was still in high school. Even funnier, I knew how to program computers, thus I also knew how to create my own fonts to download to impact printers (dotmatrix) to generate custom characters. In my case, I got tired of handwriting the headings on the paper spreadsheets, such as "taxes", "electrical utility" etc. So what I did was make dotmatrix fonts rotated 90 degrees so that they could be printed sideways because the paper spreadsheets were long horizontally. This was the compromise I had doing bookkeeping on spreadsheets traditionally by hand until we started to use the DOS version of Quicken which made bookkeeping much easier. It was the same when the clinic originally used typewriters & handwriting to write up patient billing invoices & insurance forms until we got into patient billing management software in the mid 1980's. Computers made all that faster, convenient, less errors & cleaner output. Thus, much less need for rubber erasers, Liquid Paper & Lift-off correction tape.

[@ogami1972]

So cool to see an after-market upgrade that really performs.

[@raven4k998]

get your dealer to install it good luck on that one these days🤣

[@MatthewM-i8x]

Great review. This reminds me of the used system I picked up in high school with the entire proceeds of a summer job. It was an SE with a Dove Marathon 030 upgrade. I used it heavily all the way up to the end of '94. It's easy to dismiss the spec bump now as negligible but that upgrade did truly make a difference.

[@setoth1234]

The RAM disk feature must have been super cool!! Would love to see you run OutSpoken from the disk and see just how fast the screenreader is.

[@simonro9168]

The Happy Mac with fangs is the cutest little detail I've ever seen :D

[@PotatoFi]

Awesome upgrade. While my SE/30 is my favorite machine for obvious reasons, I'm very partial to my SE FDHD with an Ethernet card installed. Like the Prodigy, the Ethernet card is almost the same size as the logic board!

[@beepyshenanigans]

i thought my geforce 6800 agp was big, A CARD THE SIZE OF THE ENTIRE MOTHERBOARD! wow that’s huge, i could imagine the pain having to take it out without breaking it, it’s really hard to take my 6800 out of my microatx case

[@nukfauxsho]

Awesome! another upgrade vid!

[@trumpeter811]

just thought i'd note and say this never showed up in my sub box. i always watch your videos friday during my lunch and was surprised when i couldnt find it in my sub box

[@ThisDoesNotCompute]

KZbin does that sometimes, and it’s super frustrating!

[@jasonhoch7105]

I have this exact rare upgrade card for an old SE I have. I didn’t even realize it had the card when I bought it at a garage sale for $10. I only realized was when I booted it…it was WAY too fast and responsive for an SE, and showed 36mb of RAM, so I cracked it open, and it was like Christmas… 68020, FPU and MMU. Still not my SE/30 powerhouse, but wow…it’s what the original SE should’ve been.

[@hypertalking68k]

More of this please! I also have a few SE accelerators and I find this era in Macintosh addons fascinating

[@marsim4150]

I'm very curious about how you store all these marvelous tech in your house, one day or another you should make a video tour of your great studio 🙂

[@drywinddotnet]

Great overview of a high end card. All of us SE owners in the day were so into accelerators they became a hobby in themselves. My first SE saw SuperMac, Radius, and Mobius cards during its life, but while fast, they were still limited by the 4MB max memory. The Prodigy SE's memory wizardry was impressive, and I wish that could be reverse engineered to make a modern SE accelerator today that would extend the RAM of this wonderful retro machine.

[@tredonmirc2]

Love your commentary, editing and historical details in your videos. Thanks for your great work!

[@DryPaperHammerBro]

That vampire edit is cute!

[@slaquers]

Hey, I absolutely LOVE your classic Mac videos. Like, I really do! Keep making them please! I like your other videos as well - but the Mac ones just get me just right :]

[@3rdalbum]

It's ironic that MacWrite was crashing with a system error of "Co-processor Not Installed", given that the upgrade board DID have the Co-processor installed and MacWrite runs perfectly well without one.

[@randallsmith2521]

There were a ton of awesome upgrades for the 128k, 512k, 512ke, Plus, SE, and Classic. Not just PDS cards, but there were several upgrades that repackaged the system into a new case and allowed for external displays to be used. Of course, none in color since those Macs didn't support color. I need to look around and see if I can find some videos on those. I knew a guy that bought an old SE back in the mid 1990's that had a radius upgrade with a full page monitor. Those full page monitors were awesome back in the day.

[@garrettfuller8418]

I have a Macintosh SE with a Mobius '030 accelerator card installed, giving me 16 MB RAM and a 25 MHz Motorola 68030. (It has a coprocessor slot for a Motorola FPU, but mine doesn't have one.) The Mobius card even has a video output for an external display for more screen real estate. I believe the previous owner used the display with it, although I unfortunately acquire it. He got a lot of use out of it... I believe it was used all the way up to the later '90s.

[@klwthe3rd]

The Vampire Machine Icon makes this whole upgrade worthwhile!!! That is the kewlest Easter Egg for that time period and was very clever of the engineers. I tip my hat to them. 🧛🧛🧛🧛

[@msthalamus2172]

it's strange to think, but I have an 8 year old i7. It does everything I need it to do and I haven't come close to tapping its full potential in some ways. Looking back, though, try to imagine using a Mac 128k in 1992 as your daily driver, as the machine you use to make your living. It would have been unthinkable! Even though I lived through it, it's sometimes hard to remember just how fast everything was evolving back then, and just how quickly any given machine became obsolete.

[@gentle285]

This is so fascinating.

[@JDW-]

Another wonderful video with excellent videography, as usual. But I must say that the part shown at 8:21 about the special setting exclusively for MacWrite version 4.5 was truly interesting indeed. Leads one to wonder if newer versions like 4.6, 5.0 & II were compatible with that setting, if they needed it at all. Could be it only sniffed version 4.5, which meant you were probably stuck with that version unless you disabled the accelerator entirely. All said, a very informative video. I have a special interest in the SE, seeing I have one with a Levco SuperMac SpeedCard.

[@lyonadimral]

You can tell that motherboard was old; did you see the PRAM battery was made in WEST Germany?

[@beepyshenanigans]

the board is probably from 1989 or older

[@Markimark151]

I just opened an old Mac SE I got from a flea market, it’s one of those computers I don’t like fixing, especially with the CRT screen with that aging components! Also I wish those SE computers used HD floppy disks, because I had lots of old Mac games from that era like Dark Castle, Super Munchers, Alien Force, Diamonds, Daleks on floppy disks!

[@kirishima638]

These compacts have held up better than much later machines. The SE has no leaky caps on its motherboard for example. Later machines from the late 90s and literally crumbling under their own weight now.

[@Markimark151]

@@kirishima638 it depends on who used them back when they were new. I remember the ones used in an elementary school aged terribly, because they were worn out! Even the mice and keyboards were damaged or don’t come with their original computers! Also you better have some low density floppy disks, because the disk drives from 1987 won’t read them! I avoid the earlier models for their incompatibility issues and scarce components that are hard to replace!

[@kirishima638]

@@Markimark151 I’m not talking about wear and tear I’m talking about the construction. Pretty much every beige II, LC, Quadra, PowerMac and Performa released between 1994 and 1998 is so brittle and fragile so as to self destruct when touched but these early compacts don’t have this issue. Their CRTs have also held up much better than the LCD displays of the PowerBooks. And they’re generally easy to fix, provided there’s no corrosion or battery leakage.

[@Markimark151]

@@kirishima638 true that the older computer parts were better since they were sourced from American suppliers. But I hate how the proprietary parts and components are so hard to find and replace, I wasted so much time trying to fix that old Mac SE computer that I couldn’t even get those particular parts online! I had to go through different sellers and even my local computer shop doesn’t even know how to service it! Even David the 8-bit guy doesn’t recommend Mac SE, he prefers newer Macs from the mid-90s for being more easily upgradable since they’re more modern and can have more flash memory!

[@Streaml1neJMoose]

Man, that scrolling text document induced a flashback of writing book reports in DOS WordPerfect in the late 80's/early 90's. I got a simultaneous sense of joy and dread for a minute there.

[@dmnddog7417]

The Mac SE and SE/30 were super nice little machines.

[@rafakonopacki5048]

Awesome material. :)

[@GarthBeagle]

You eventually cut that battery out, right? 😁#getthebatteriesout

[@Vvardenfell_Outlander]

This card blew me away! Thanks for sharing. You should get that memory controller chip! A color monitor would be cool too.

[@TheBasementChannel]

Great conversion! Would love to find one of these for my SE but they seem to be unobtanium. Good job finding one and getting it working. I wonder if the Prodigy upgrade also allowed for HD floppy upgrades to match the SE FDHD.

[@ukmk3supra]

Thats an easy upgrade, but would require a new drive, new system roms and a SWIM chip in DIP 28 form. Luckily all those chips are socketed in the SE.

[@cylurian]

My boss had this configuration. I would love to have one for memories.

[@incyphe]

late 80s and early 90s was such a fun time for Macintosh owners. Remember the Daystar Accelerator card? 68030 50MHz!

[@razorsz195]

What. A. Score!

[@craigw.scribner6490]

Thanks!

[@cylurian]

Ya, SE/30 I totally forgot. That is a great machine.

[@kirishima638]

My first Mac was an SE with 2mb of RAM. I made a lot of ‘art’ on it using a Studio/1, an early graphics program by pre-evil Electronic Arts. I tried Studio/1 again recently on my PowerBook 100 which is in theory twice as fast as the SE. But just filling gradient shapes was incredibly slow, something an FPU would have helped with. I must have had a lot of patience back then because I used that gradient tool a lot….

[@choppergirl]

I think I installed a 68030 33mghz card, and 1mb to 4mb. The SE was a dog otherwise at stock 68000 8mghz. The 17mb 60ms access SCSI drive was noisy and slow but a godsend compared to the floppy shuffle. Quickly outdated though. Upgraded to a LC3 68040 @ 25mghz and color. Both were nice machines way ahead of their time.

[@kylek6922]

What a neat upgrade. Not gonna lie, I'm a little bit jealous lol

[@dennisfahey2379]

It was rumored Jobs closed the Mac architecture for a couple reasons: 1) It substantially saved costs, 2) It reduced the number of tech support calls as most were due to expansion card incompatibilities and bugs and 3) he had just come off a major problem with the Apple II getting widely "cloned" globally. A lot of people think the "clone market" started with the IBM PC but in fact as soon as the Apple II was a success the clones out of Taiwan specifically flooded the market. Names like Banana, Orange, Pineapple, Pear and Apricot etc. And these were more times then not direct knockoffs - same circuit boards, even copied APPLE ROMs. The story goes Jobs went to the Feds for help and they said there were no laws being violated. At the time there was no law protecting software, firmware and even board designs. People, including Apple, attempted to use copyright law to protect their IP but it was an uphill battle. Cloning (piracy) was all the rage and it was not just Apple's problem. I recall hearing one company was almost driven into bankruptcy by a cloning concern that even duplicated the floppies, labels and manuals. This was found out when a customer sent in a unit for warranty repair and it was clearly not authentic. That particular company was shocked to find the pirate company had far better sales then they had. Interesting tangent - when Apple was in deep trouble they licensed the Mac for legal cloning. A design that used PC form factor parts and had more slots and higher performance was sold by "Power Computing". Those designs were far more powerful (primarily because they could have fans) and and cheaper than the real deal - being willing to accept lower margins . When Jobs returned from NeXT Computer to save the company he killed that licensing. Interestingly the NeXT OS - NeXTStep was so advanced that is was used to prototype the WWW. That code merged into Mac OS-X and addressed some critical shortcomings. It was also the first consumer fully object oriented centric OS which gave it a fertile field for development. So what some have said was Job's biggest failure actually saved Apple and spawned the Web. The classic exactly right at slightly the wrong time.

[@andresbravo2003]

All that I saw is that The Macintosh SE might be needed upgrades to make it better.

[@Kennephone]

I didn't expect that the upgrade would have been over $3000, I expected $1500, maybe $2000 at most. The apple tax has always been around, even going back to the Apple 2, which costed about double of a PET or TRS80, it was more useable though.

[@zincmann]

5:30 Please tell me you cleaned the board(s) before you put them in that machine? :-)

[@dmnddog7417]

Right? Ugh, I saw all that dust and I was like, "I hope he used compressed air to clean all that."

[@zincmann]

@dmnddog7417 he's usually pretty bad about cleaning stuff. If you watch a lot of his videos things are always dusty when he puts them back together.

[@wmalden]

My first Apple computer was an SE 40/4.

[@fd5927]

Oh my "Thank god for HD VIDEO and now KZbin zooming function." Dust and what I assume to be dog hair (I hope it's dog hair) now fully visible. 😮

[@beepyshenanigans]

i hope it’s just hair

[@oidpolar6302]

Mac SE is missing Digital Ink display

[@beepyshenanigans]

they didn’t use e ink displays

[@howardbaldwin1226]

I really enjoy these vintage Mac upgrade presentations. My SE/30 was a smash hit in its day and is now a computing classic! Thanks so much for sharing.

[@rosariodagosto6484]

Good old days

[@1BitFeverDreams]

I'm wondering if it played nice with sound output for games, especially the ones designed with the Sound Driver of the earliest System 6 and everything before 6.

[@LondenTower]

WOW, that prodigy board sure is fast. I've never seen a mac like that boot so fast. (when an old mac boots 10x faster than a 2013 imac, that's when you know)

[@LuteFrontier]

I miss the good old days

[@nikdog419]

7:05 I suspect PRAM slowly losing capacitor charge until weird low voltage data corruption

[@paolocoppi7444]

can you upgrade to System 7.x and maintain the accelerator?

[@MatthewM-i8x]

good question...I had the Dove Marathon 030...My memory is very hazy but I believe the answer was 'no', at least for that particular card. I don't believe the extension packages for the control panel cooperated with 7 and I never found subsequent support from Dove. Even dismissing the accelerator, I remember still trying to work with System 7 but I don't think I got anywhere - too many issues or too heavy a resource demand. I reverted quickly to System 6.0.8. and remained happy. I think the only problem I eventually later ran into was a later version of ClarisWorks which required 7. It was a little bit of a let down but I decided I could live without.

[@gold2chrome]

My accelerator card Novy Quick30 (a 68030 CPU / 6888x FPU combo with RAM slots) ran System 7.0 without problems on a Macintosh SE.

[@Shocker-tf7sy]

I want to see someone fully upgrade as much as possible in a Dell Latitude E6510 laptop from 2010 I really want to know how far you can upgrade one of them cause my friend has one and it can’t run basically anything good on it

[@chrissmith1011]

I saved 2 original Macs 10001's (i think that the model number) from a dumpster and they both had a Hyperdrive 5MB HD installed which at the time I believe they were $2000 upgrades.

[@be236]

I had quite a few of these old classic Macs.. wish I had kept them instead of selling/giving them away back in the day... Alas...

[@anon_y_mousse]

I had a lot of fun with ramdisks back in the day when I first starting using a computer. I couldn't do it on Windows, but Linux let me just create them willy-nilly. Although there wasn't much point on Linux since it had less to load and was a bit faster than Windows on top of that, unless of course you wanted to use it for some kind of security purposes. I kind of miss them being a thing as now you definitely don't need them.

[@destroyer6470]

Im still interested in seeing if someone gets a vampire amiga accelerator working on a 68k mac

[@ConsolesRetro]

Sympa comme add-on! Je ne connaissait pas ^^. Merci pour le partage 🙂

[@erc3338]

Is anyone else hearing barely audible crackles or pops? I don't think I heard it on other videos, but I wanna make sure my phone speakers aren't dying for any reason.

[@beepyshenanigans]

yeah your speakers are dying

[@erc3338]

@@beepyshenanigans Weird, because it was only with this video. Even a Domino's ad sounded normal.

[@beepyshenanigans]

@@erc3338 hmm, maybe this videos volume is louder

[@erc3338]

I just realized; Since it only happens when watching KZbin videos, and not when listening to MP3s or even KZbin ads, am I possibly just hearing audio recorded without a Pop Filter? or do we know that ETA uses a pop filter?

[@83hjf]

i guess mac users tolerate non-upgradability shenanigans because it's been like that from day one. i mean I can understand the new "ultra fast memory so it has to be integrated into the CPU" concept of M-series silicon, but "soldered SSD" is just plain greed. and well, e-waste potential. and apple knows it can get away with it.

[@beepyshenanigans]

yeah and now microsoft is doing stuff like that with win11, it made many computers, which are still fast and usable, turn into e-waste. microsoft is making computers, which are still snappy, go to waste. also they put lots of bloat into windows 11, but it can still run on a core 2 duo laptop with 2 gb ram, pretty quickly. you have to bypass the bogus requirements tho. i’m maining a 5-6 year old lenovo 330s with upgradable ram ssd network, and it’s fast with arch on rhere

[@83hjf]

@@beepyshenanigans the microsoft that announced they're going to sell replacement parts for the computers they make? also for a secondary machine I'm running an old Core2Duo 3GB RAM with the latest kde and ubuntu and it works beautifully. an HP Laptop bought back in 2008. I upgraded its SSD and it's been great.

[@JH-no8sy]

The same Microsoft that said Windows 10 was going to be their last OS. Newer computers are less serviceable and companies get rid of them after 2-3 years, calling them “old”. I’ve got Thinkpads older than I am that still work. E-waste is the new model because of consumerism.

[@3rdalbum]

The original Mac was designed to have upgradeable memory. Admittedly it was behind Steve Jobs' back and required a soldering iron (Jobs would have noticed a memory socket so they couldn't include one) but the motherboard designers did purposely route some traces to make the process easier for end users.

[@beepyshenanigans]

@@3rdalbum shows how the designers cared

[@barcigian]

This is catnip for enthusiasts!

[@combusean]

I really wonder why the SE didn't include a faster CPU. A 12.5 MHz 68000 was available.

[@ukmk3supra]

Everything is derived from the 15.6672 MHz system clock. If you run the CPU at another speed, you throw everything else clocked to sync with it, out of the window.

[@danielktdoranie]

Daystar, fighter of the Nightstar aaaaahhhhaaaa

[@orektez]

hope you took that battery out, just seeing it, made me nervous. i've had several bad experiences with batteries like that.

[@beepyshenanigans]

yeah those cmos batteries leak and corrode the entire board, even the coin cells can do that, i took mine out of my pentium 4 machine as its about time for it to start leaking and i need to get a replacement vga cable as the xomputer is showing no signs of life, it was working after i took out the battery so that’s not a problem. i haven’t had one leak on me yet, but as i have 2 20+ year old computers, im sure i will see that happen soon. i actually mained one of them for like 2 weeks, a dell c600 with a 850 mhz p3 and 256 megs, the original hdd still works, but is slow and dying, i replaced it with a 40 gb variant of the same drive, which was made in 2009. The c600 is from 2000-01. i’m currently maining a 5 year old lenovo 330s running arch linux

[@KelikakuCoutin]

Thanks for the content. Keep up the good work. בס'ד

[@crzy_joystk256]

Omg, so Fast

[@abb1793]

You should have ended saying that you could make YOUR MacSE a... prodigy...

[@eric470ast]

Why are the boards so dirty? Can’t they be cleaned before doing the video?

[@dubayyuae8696]

not fangs, its supposed to be a tongue out

[@DanielLandolph-h1i]

COLIN I need a hot shower 🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿 with you

[@gowron277a]

I wish I could sell my vintage mac stuff, I want to downsize the clutter but I doubt anyone is in the market for that kind of stuff and it would cost to much to ship anyway. Guess ill have to break it all down and toss it.