Macintosh SE/30

The Macintosh SE/30 is a personal computer that was designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1989 until 1991. It was the fastest and most expandable of the original black-and-white compact Macintosh series.

The SE/30 is essentially a Macintosh IIx in the same case as the Macintosh SE, with a black-and-white monitor and a single PDS slot (rather than the NuBus slots of the IIx) which supported third-party accelerators, network cards, or a display adapter. Although officially only able to support 32 MB, the SE/30 could expand up to 128 MB of RAM (a ludicrous amount of RAM at the time), and included a 40 or 80 MB hard drive. It was also the first compact Mac to include a 1.44 MB high density floppy disk drive as standard (late versions of the SE had one, but earlier versions did not). In keeping with Apple’s practice from the Apple II+ until the Power Macintosh G3 was announced, a logic board upgrade was available to convert a regular SE to a SE/30. The SE would then have exactly the same specs as an SE/30, with the difference only in the floppy drive if the SE had a 800k drive. The set included a new front bezel to replace the original SE bezel with that of an SE/30.

The Apple Macintosh SE/30 features a 16 MHz 68030 processor, 1 MB of RAM, and either a 40 MB or 80 MB hard drive in a compact all-in-one case with a 9″ monochrome display. Basically, the SE/30 is the IIcx in a smaller case with fewer expansion options, and is the fastest of all of the monochrome compact Macs.  One thing to note about the SE/30 was it’s longevity, with many users retaining this Mac for a decade before finally retiring it.