I'm not quite as fond of this little Mac as I am of my others. I've never really been
a fan of the early Macs.
I like Apple because they make very well designed systems. I'm not an Apple
evangelist. Alright, I own a bunch, but my primary machines are a pair of PCs.
If you open up Apples from about '85 on, you can immediately see that someone sat down
and put a hell of a lot of thought into what they were doing.
Everything is clipped down and just pops out, there's not 30 screws to undo, there's
no thumbnail breaking steel clasps... You can break down an LC or a IIcx or an LC630 in
the space of a minute, I challenge you to do that with a PC.
This is something that enterprise manufacturers have always had in mind, somewhat,
because if your Sun had a faulty powersupply, you needed to replace it with the smallest
amount of downtime... And I guess Apple just decided that was cool enough to do themselves.
So, where was I? Oh yes, the SE.
The SE doesn't just "pop apart", the monitor is internal and rather bland and trying
to open the damn things requires a 6 foot long torx driver from Sears.
Asides from that, however, originally they came with two 800k floppy drives, my
particular model is an SE FDHD, with a high-density "SuperDrive" (1.44M 3.5"), and
an internal SCSI harddisk (80M).
There is one PDS slot, and its an utter bitch to get to, in my opinion. One of my SEs
has a "SuperSE" upgrade board, with an '030 on it. Talk about cramped. This effectively
made my SE into the later SE/30 model.
The original SE came out in '86.
What do I use my SEs for? I stack them back-to-back, and use them as a scanner table.