Background information
Trying out Linux on a Mac with an Apple Silicon chip
by David Lee
The unforgettable charm of early Macs
The first Macintosh was released in 1984. My own journey began a little later, with subsequent models that looked almost identical. To celebrate Apple’s 50th anniversary, I’m reminiscing and booting up my Macintosh SE/30.
As my Macintosh SE/30 boots up and displays the smiling Mac icon, I crack a smile along with it. A long-forgotten memory from my youth comes flooding back. It’s amazing how all of this has been etched into my long-term memory: the startup ping, the fan kicking in, followed shortly by the whirring of the hard drive and the gradual loading of system components, before the desktop finally appears. The sounds made when inserting, reading, and ejecting a floppy disk are also unforgettable.
I wrote the paragraph above before I dug out my old computer, dusted it off, and booted it up. Reality isn’t as glamorous: lately, the audio output hasn’t been working properly, both through the speaker and headphones. Still, these things can happen with a 35-year-old device.
Endless rows of colourful Mac cubes
The first Macintosh, released in 1984, had an iconic design: a cube with a built-in CRT monitor – a tiny 9-inch black-and-white screen. 512×342 pixels. Inside, a Motorola processor. In the years that followed, Apple released several more models, each one a little better than the last, but always based on the same principle. Apple continued to sell cube Macs with monochrome screens until 1993.
The SE/30 was released in 1989, the first cube Mac without a Motorola 68000, but the significantly faster 68030. It also sports a coprocessor, no fewer than eight RAM slots, and a variety of expansion options. It’s by far the most powerful Mac in its original form. I bought it on ricardo.ch in the 2000s for 50 francs and painted it blue since it had yellowed badly.
Around the same time, I also bought a Macintosh Classic at an auction and repainted it as well. However, it hasn’t started up in quite some time. I also bought a third cube Mac for spare parts. Its empty case has been sitting in place for ages, waiting for me to finally get started on my modding project: I want to attach a small flat-screen monitor and place a Mac Mini or Raspberry Pi inside.
Our first computer
I was born in 1976, just like Apple. The Macintosh played an important role in my childhood and teenage years: it was used in schools, and my father was a teacher. At twelve years old, I sat in the teachers’ lounge amazed as I used a Macintosh for the first time. With its external second monitor, the computer could display an A4 page in portrait orientation. WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get. Back then, visualising exactly what a printed page would look like on-screen was rare. I drew with a spray can and pencil in MacPaint, typed a little in MacWrite, and deliberately clicked outside the warning dialogues just to hear that ding-dong warning sound over and over again. In that teachers’ lounge, which smelled of ink and stale cigarette smoke, I typed up articles for a very short-lived school newspaper (just one issue).
We didn’t have a computer at home, but a little while later my father bought a Macintosh SE. There was no other option. Not even my floppy disks were compatible with DOS and Windows environments.
I was a little jealous of my neighbour and his very own Amiga 500. He had hundreds of games – all in colour, of course – which he’d bought from other students for a franc each. The Mac, with its tiny black-and-white screen, couldn’t keep up. In terms of sound technology, however, the Macintosh was very advanced for its time. There were also a few cool games, like Dark Castle, Shufflepuck Cafe, Pirates, Lode Runner, Crystal Quest, and Shadowgate – an adventure game where even the slightest mistake meant instant death. Here are a few highlights from Shufflepuck Cafe.
A network without the internet
In high school, I took a course to learn ten-finger typing. After actually completing the first part on an IBM typewriter, I finished in a room full of Macs. They were Macintosh Plus models, already slightly outdated even back then. Their keyboards were very high and tiring to type on, but I still loved it. The Macs were connected via an AppleTalk network. It was so slow that even opening a folder on the file server could take several minutes. However, we could still use this network to send messages like «A system error has occurred», a classic prank for us nerdy teens. Same with the ResEdit software, which allowed users to turn the Recycle Bin into a toilet – complete with a flushing sound when emptying it. Another popular prank involved modifying the system so that a loud Hallelujah! would ring out every time a key was pressed.
When I was 19 or 20, I was given a decommissioned cube Mac. My very first computer! It was completely outdated, but still good enough for writing school papers. And by then, I’d grown quite fond of those monochrome clunky things. The biggest drawback: I couldn’t access the internet.
Working with an 80s Computer
I find it fascinating how little storage space is taken up. The game Dark Castle fits on an 800-KB floppy disk, including the operating system – a mere 40 KB in size. Even a fully-fledged operating system can fit on a floppy disk. Photoshop requires 728 KB. On my modern computer, the same software takes up 5.29 GB. The hard drive’s 120 MB – obviously an aftermarket upgrade – feel like 10 TB today. No matter how much I add, the disk never fills up.
The Y2K bug seems to have hit Macs 20 years late. The internal calendar on older Mac systems ends on 31 December 2019. More recent data can’t be displayed; the clock jumps back to 1 January 1920. You can fix this using the SetDate tool – provided you can get the tool onto the old Mac and unzip it there.
Am I still able to do anything useful with a Mac that old in 2026? Well, it’s only suitable for office work; the performance isn’t up to par for anything else. To actually do anything with my work, I need to transfer the documents to a modern computer. By default – that is, without any network or SCSCI extensions – this is only possible using floppy disks.
I try to create a Word document and an image file, then open them on a modern computer to edit them further or send them on.
Simple: creating files
First, I create a Word document. It’s easy, convenient, and fast – Word was still good at the time. It already had plenty of features, like tables and paragraph styles, but no feature overload. No AutoCorrect that changes MHz to Mhz or capitalises the first letter of every abbreviation and other nonsense like that.
Then, out of the blue, the system crashes. The infamous bomb.
I remember how normal this used to be. If a program error occurs, it’s not just the application that crashes: my entire system goes, and the computer has to restart. Nothing can be restored either. Your work just disappears if you don’t save it regularly.
I use a few screenshots as image files. On the old SE/30, taking them works much the same way as it does today with ⌘+Shift+3. That’s it.
Transfer via floppy disk
Now comes the tricky part. As a die-hard nostalgia nerd, I naturally have a floppy disk drive with a USB port. But oh, the irony: today’s Apple computers can’t read Apple’s floppy disk format – but they can read the DOS format. Even funnier: it’d probably work on Windows. At least, it used to work in the past with the TransMac tool.
Fortunately, an extension called PC Exchange is installed on the SE/30 system. This way, I can use a DOS floppy disk as a replacement.
But that only works with data, not programs. The reason for this is a unique quirk of the old Apple file system. It consists of both a data fork and a resource fork. Since other file systems don’t support this, the resource fork is lost as you copy. Text files don’t have a resource fork. Older Mac programs do.
But even when transferring the files, things don’t always go smoothly. My copy messes up the file names: Word Document becomes !WORD-DO.KUM. When it comes to screenshots, the Mac treats them as executable Unix files. So, I rename everything and add the file extensions .doc and .pict.
The current version of Word can’t open my old Word document and suggests I try using Apple’s TextEdit. Irony becomes a running gag. TextEdit opens it, but displays it incorrectly. The RTF document, on the other hand, displays properly; even the table is rendered correctly. Only the paragraph formatting is lost, since the RTF format doesn’t support it. I can also read the text file without encountering any incorrect special characters.
The preview shows a white area for all screenshots. But I can open the images in Photoshop and convert them to GIFs or something else. The result:
But of course, I didn’t pull this device out to get any real work done – I did it purely out of nostalgia. It reminds me of a time when I found computers – and Macs in particular – new, exciting and fascinating. I still work with a Mac today – or rather, I’m back to using one – but I don’t have any emotional attachment to it. To me, it’s just a tool for work. Silent, unassuming and, in its perfection, somehow boring.
David Lee
Senior Editor
David.Lee@digitecgalaxus.chMy interest in IT and writing landed me in tech journalism early on (2000). I want to know how we can use technology without being used. Outside of the office, I’m a keen musician who makes up for lacking talent with excessive enthusiasm.
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