Upgrading an
SE/30

The Macintosh SE/30 is still a pretty popular machine with collectors and those wanting to run a nice small server. The one sticky point with SE/30 upgrades were the incredibly high cost of 16mb 30 pin simms which would take the machine up to 128 mb or memory. This memory was also used in the Quadra 900/950 series Macs and today in 2005 you can sometimes find this surplus ram on places like eBay for decent prices.

One word of warning though not all 16 mb chips that work in the Quadra 900/950 will work in the SE/30. The ram below works just great in the Quadra 900/950 but on the SE/30 boots into the chimes of doom.

The SE/30 has eight 30 pin simm slots so you would populate all 8 slots with these chips. If you can't find eight you will want four as you should populate each of the two banks with the same size of memory chip. The SE/30 would take, 256k, 1 mb, 2 mb, 4 mb or 16 mb 30 pin simms.

When working on the SE/30 be careful not to break the back of the picture tube. So the first thing you do once the cover is off is gently pull off the plug at the rear of the tube. There are also high voltages in the power supply so you need to be very careful when working on this machine. If in doubt don't!

This is what you should see once the tube has been unplugged.

Once the cover is removed you can remove the motherboard. This is accomplished by unplugging the power cable, floppy cable and hard drive cable. If you have anything installed in the pds slot this must be removed as well. Once everything is unplugged gently slide the board up, note the slots and keys on the right side in the photo below.

If all went well this is what you should see.

This particular SE/30 was set up as a FirstClass based server. FirstClass is a Macintosh based 'bbs' and mail server software that is still being sold through a company located in Markham Ontario. I've run FirstClass for over 13 years and the server that you are currently accessing is running this software on a PowerTower Pro with a G3 upgrade card. For limited non web use the SE/30 is a pretty dandy machine.

The SE/30 has a PDS slot which was able to accept several types of cards including ethernet, and 040 based accelertor cards. The trick with the accelerator cards was that you had to use a special adaptor since the cards were also designed to fit into other Macs of that era such as the IIci and IIsi which also required an adaptor. If anyone has a Daystar Turbo 040 adaptor card for an SE/30 I'd be very interested in purchasing it from you.

I think the most common upgrade is a pds ethernet adaptor such as this one.

Unlike some of the other compact Macs this one was not 'signed' on the inside of the case.

Otherwise this Mac is still pretty useable even today in 2005 for some applications. I think for the serious Macintosh collector this is a must have. Comments? Feel free to e-mail me at kevino@newsroom.net.