The Mac SE/30 was the greatest Mac of its generation. Photo: Danamania/Wikipedia CC
January 19, 1989: Apple introduces the Macintosh SE/30, arguably the greatest of the classic black-and-white compact Macs.
When you picture the ideal 1980s Macintosh, this is likely the machine that comes to mind. And for good reason!
The promise of the Mac
As I’ve written before in “Today in Apple history,” even a hard-core Mac fan would admit that the computer’s earliest incarnation proved exciting largely because of what it had the potential to deliver.
Douglas Adams, creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, once observed, “What I (and I think everyone who bought [the Mac] in the early days) fell in love with was not the machine itself, which was ridiculously slow and underpowered, but a romantic idea of the machine. And that romantic idea had to sustain me through the realities of actually working on the 128K Mac.”
The Mac SE/30 delivers the goods
The Mac SE/30 was the speediest Mac around.Photo: Motorola
Things got considerably better when the Macintosh Plus shipped two years after the original Mac made its debut. However, it wasn’t until the SE/30 arrived in 1989 that the Mac hit its stride. In everything from the elegance of its operating system to its sheer hardware horsepower, this computer faced few rivals.
The SE/30 boasted a 16-MHz Motorola 68030 processor and either a 40MB or 80MB hard drive. It came with a choice of 1MB or 4MB of RAM as standard — which, amazingly, could be expanded up to a whopping 128MB. Oh, and it packed a 1.4MB SuperDrive, too.
But the Mac SE/30 truly showed its strength when System 7 arrived in 1991. At that point, earlier Macs began to look decidedly decrepit.
Apple discontinued the SE/30 that year, but it remained a workhorse of a computer. You could find it in many offices, research labs and homes throughout the first half of the 1990s.
The Macintosh SE/30 in TV and movies
The Mac SE/30 also made several appearances on TV and in the movies. Most notably, it became as the first Mac to appear in Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment in the early seasons of Seinfeld. (Later it got replaced with a PowerBook Duo and then a Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh.)
Do you remember the Macintosh SE/30? Leave your comments below.
Mac SE/30 specs source: EveryMac