Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
#2That's the electronics equivalent of sticking a jet engine in a Cessna, very nice!
I really love this kind of hack, instead of ending up in the landfill someone has a ton of fun, learns a lot and breathes new life into a bunch of old hardware. Obviously it's not going to be able to hold its own against modern hardware but who cares, as long as itches get scratched it's all in the game.
If you look at crate upon crate of mobile phones trashed as e-waste and you realize that each and every one of them is probably the equivalent of a 1980's super computer and still working from an electronics point of view then the 'planned obsolescence' path that we are on is ultimately doomed to fail. Sooner or later really building for re-use will have to become the norm.
Re: Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
#3That's the electronics equivalent of sticking a jet engine in a Cessna, very nice! I really love this kind of hack, instead of ending up in the landfill someone has a ton of fun, learns a lot and breathes new life into a bunch of old hardware. Obviously it's not going to be able to hold its own against modern hardware but who cares, as long as itches get scratched it's all in the game. If you look at crate upon crate…
The only, big problem, is that reuse does not increase profits.
The problem is made worse by the fact that those phones cannot easily be converted to run something else.
Re: Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
#4That's the electronics equivalent of sticking a jet engine in a Cessna, very nice! I really love this kind of hack, instead of ending up in the landfill someone has a ton of fun, learns a lot and breathes new life into a bunch of old hardware. Obviously it's not going to be able to hold its own against modern hardware but who cares, as long as itches get scratched it's all in the game. If you look at crate upon crate…
The only, big problem, is that reuse does not increase profits. The problem is made worse by the fact that those phones cannot easily be converted to run something else.
For a long time I've figured that profits to a company should be seen relative to cost to society, not just cost to the company. This is seriously broken and the driver behind most externalization effects.
Re: Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
#5That's the electronics equivalent of sticking a jet engine in a Cessna, very nice! I really love this kind of hack, instead of ending up in the landfill someone has a ton of fun, learns a lot and breathes new life into a bunch of old hardware. Obviously it's not going to be able to hold its own against modern hardware but who cares, as long as itches get scratched it's all in the game. If you look at crate upon crate…
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Re: Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
#6That's the electronics equivalent of sticking a jet engine in a Cessna, very nice! I really love this kind of hack, instead of ending up in the landfill someone has a ton of fun, learns a lot and breathes new life into a bunch of old hardware. Obviously it's not going to be able to hold its own against modern hardware but who cares, as long as itches get scratched it's all in the game. If you look at crate upon crate…
the electronics equivalent of sticking a jet engine in a Cessna
Not to take anything away from this cool thing but both of these cards were designed/made for the SE/30 as was the passthrough capability. It's a little closer to what Melba Toast is packin' right here
Re: Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
#7You have to applaud this guy, getting an ethernet card and a video card in an SE/30 would have been impressive way back in the 1980s, let alone now.
From memory at the university, we had Fastpath boxes (maybe before they were bought by Shiva). At one point about a decade ago I got nostalgic for classic macs and hooked 512 up in my garage with a Fastpath. Took me a while to get enough working localtalk adaptors and whatnot to set it up, and another while to track down the right networking software to get it working.
Turned it on, configured, whoah I have an IP address in MacTCP. Got it file sharing off the house Linux server. Fired up macwww and pointed it at google and about 15 minutes later, after heroically trying to render the page I got a few characters and nothing recognisable. An SE/30 is miles faster than a 512 so you might be able to do something useful with it, but macwww didn't render graphics and chokes on anything that isn't plain html.
I think it would be even worse now, you would need a HTTPS/HTTP proxy to get anything at all.
Nostalgic computing is awfully fun but all the fun is in the setup, finding parts, working on solutions etc. The end product is generally underwhelming but the journey is the real reward.
Re: Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
#8Need to get A/UX running on it now.
I only found out decades later that I could, eventually, have crammed 32MB into the 8 slots of my SE/30 I bought "maxed out" at 8M.
Re: Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
#9While impressive, it would have been a lot easier to just use a SCSI connected Ethernet adapter. Correct SCSI termination would have required sacrificing a chicken and drawing a pentagram in blood, but still easier than this project.
Re: Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
#10Sometimes I think that if it weren't for heavy cryptography and graphical interfaces, I could do so many things online even with a computer as old as this one.
I could browse a textual version of HN, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram and even post and comment things!
Sending HTTP packets to an open API has been a kids game for decades, unfortunately companies just don't want you to hack together your own solution