As a bit of fun, Ewen Rankin a Birmingham Based Professional Photographer/Videographer
decided to take his 30 year old Mac SE back to an Apple Genius appointment at Apple’s
Touchwood Store in Solihull, to see what would happen and whether Apple would help to get it
running.
The Mac SE inn question is rather special as it was one of only 5 Prototypes made by Apple in
California for development purposes. It was shipped over to their Stockley Park Offices in the UK
for their UK developers in 1987. The machine stayed at Stockley Park until the offices closed and
then was given away to one of the employees who gave it to Ewen. Its spent the past 25 years
loving kept in its original bag with the original keyboard and mouse.
For the past few years Ewen has been looking for the originally shipped System 3.3 to put onto the
machine but has drawn a blank until a listener to his podcast The Mac Show on The British Tech
Network, Mark Sissons (who was an Apple Employee around that period) in Calgary Canada heard
his requests and dug out his old disks to try and help
“I was over the moon when the disks arrived from Mark in Calgary”, Said Ewen. “It’s great to have
the opportunity to restore the machine to its former glory. Another listener, Les Field, had sent in
System 7 disks as a fall back but the goal has always been to install the original OS”
“I could have tried myself but I thought it was more fun to put Apple to the test and see if they were
willing to try and help the 30 year old machine come back to life...and they did”
As it turned out the trip back to Apple was well worth it as one of the Genius’ at the store had
owned Macs back to the 80s and offered some great advice and support. Add to that the mouse
and SCSI Drive decided not to play nicely on the day and the extra support was welcome
Apple understandably perhaps, declined Ewen’s request to video the whole thing but were fine with
Photographs of the appointment being taken.
It all started well with the machine firing up first time, unfortunately, the mouse was less keen to
play along and after some digging, dredging of memories, scratching of heads and a call to Darren
Griffin (themacfixer.co.uk), the combination of keystrokes for Keyboard control were used to get
things moving.
The OS booted and ran from the single density 3.5" floppy disk just fine and even continued from RAM so that Utilities and other programs could be launched, but after attempting to install to the OS to the internal SCSI Drive, it became apparent that it wasn't having any of it..
Mark Sisson shed some light on the reasons.
“The original prototypes were fitted with 20MB Sony disk drives and these were prone to ‘Stiction’ as we called it where the read/write head would become stuck on the platters. The solution was to take out the drive and then forcefully spin the hard drive back and forth in your hand to try and loosen the platters before putting it back in, where it would often work just fine. Apple subsequently replaced these for the 40MB Quantum drives”
So the next step is to get the back off and have a look in but by that point in the Genius Bar Appointment, Ewen felt that he’d overstayed his welcome and didn't want to have to ask Apple to say ‘No’ to that request.
Everyone had a great time and the Genius’ that worked on the machine (5 at one point) all enjoyed it too.
“I was on a high all day afterwards” said Ewen, “The team at Solihull’s Touchwood Apple Store were incredible and a total credit to the firm even if the Mac was older than some of them. It was a great talking point and generated a lot of interest with loads of people either wanting to take a picture of the machine or asking for a picture with the machine. It was a great day out. Well done Apple”
