Dollar Macintosh SE Restoration

I shouldn’t place bids on computers I don’t need, but I did end up winning a Macintosh SE for only $1. It was listed as being in good physical condition with the exception of a broken “enter” key on the numpad. It would power on, but it would hang on a floppy disk icon. Restoring it turned out to be pretty straight-forward.

After it arrived, I opened it up to inspect the caps, and all of them looked good. Even the original soldered-on Varta battery was okay. However, I removed the battery and replaced it with a battery box.

The floppy drive was stuck in the closed position without a disk in it, so I gave it a good cleaning.

After cleaning the floppy, I reassembled everything to see if it would boot to the original 20MB hard drive. Unfortunately, it did not boot. So I put together a BlueSCSI kit I’ve been saving and installed System 6.0.8 from a Floppy Emu.

These devices have been indispensable when it comes to working on vintage Apple computers.

I’m still having issues with the 800K floppy drive. It can’t read any of the 400K disks I have. I’m pretty sure the 800K drive supports reading 400K disks, so I’m going to take it apart again soon and do some more troubleshooting.

The computer really was in great physical condition. I gave it a very light cleaning, and it was looking great. The keyboard and mouse need a deeper clean and a small repair, but I’ll tackle all of that after the holidays. I also think I’m going to upgrade it from the stock 1MB of RAM to 4MB.