Genius Bar Revives 30 Year Old Mac SE

If your Mac isn’t working you make a Genius Bar appointment at your local Apple Store to get some help. That’s exactly what my good friend and British Tech Network host Ewen Rankin did—except his was a 30 year old Mac SE prototype. With the help of friends he got ahold of Mac OS System 3.3 on floppy disks—the operating system the SE originally shipped with—and then made his way to the Apple Store. The geniuses were more than happy to help out even though the Mac was older than some of them, and in the end they got it up and running. Sure, Ewen could’ve taken care of the Mac himself, but enlisting the aid of the Genius Bar wasn’t only cool, it was a great example of Apple’s customer service in action.

Check It Out: Genius Bar Revives 30 Year Old Mac SE

5 thoughts on “Genius Bar Revives 30 Year Old Mac SE

  • Presumably you can use a USB floppy drive to create a bootable system disk – I’m pretty sure I’ve done this via a modern Mac, though not recently. 🙂

    There’s a lot of good desktop software that you can run on classic MacOS on an SE/30, but internet software, and web browsers in particular, have left it far behind.

    If you want a “modern” OS for the SE/30, it should be possible to run NetBSD, which is still supported with ongoing development and security patches. You might even be able to run a semi-modern web browser.

    Back in the 2000s when Macworld expo still existed, Microsoft showed versions of Word and Excel running on Macs going back to the 1980s. Amazingly enough… they all worked about the same, and Word in particular wasn’t much less responsive on an ancient Mac than it was on a modern machine.

  • Whenever I try to take a device that’s older than 5 years (and a day) into an Apple store, they laugh and tell me it’s “end of life” or “vintage” and that it is completely impossible for them to help me in any way at all. 🙁

  • Ah yes stiction. I once repaired that with a user present by gently banging on the side. I must say the guy was terrified when he realized it worked. He was looking at me as if I came from a different planet…

  • Both my Macintosh Plus and Colour Classic work fine. I had to rebuild the battery for the Colour Classic and the capacitors (?) look as if they are leaking, but the machine starts up and runs the few applications that are on it. Unfortunately, I do not have any diskettes for the machines, so have no spare system installations. Great machines, though.

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