To say this post was a long time in the making, would be an under statement. So let’s get going.

A “New” Computer

This whole thing started a few years ago, when I bought a Macintosh SE on Craigslist. My plan was to fix it up, and maybe get it online.

The only thing it did when I got it was power on. Greeting me with a flashing question mark, and a dead hard drive. With no keyboard, it was just a fancy, glowing door stop. But I didn’t plan to keep it that way for long.

I needed a working hard drive, and a keyboard (as it didn’t come with one). With a couple online orders, I had a drive, and a bad keyboard.

For a hard drive, I went with the BlueSCSI. A fancy (and cheep) little SCSI drive emulator. Getting it set up with a boot image was pretty easy, but that’s where the easy ends.

The Old Plan

What I originally wanted to do, was get the SE online, and talking to Mastodon. Unfortunately, I needed a network card. Looking online, those are pretty pricey. But, I could use a Raspberry Pi and a network adapter. The other issue, was that I needed a faster CPU to run the classic Mac Mastodon client. The SE also doesn’t support the version of System 7 the client needed. So I shelved that idea at the time, and later left Mastodon.

The New Plan

A long while later. I started messing with the Mac again. This time, I just wanted to write a blog post on it, and transfer it to my… Mac.

To cut a long story short, this ended up being pretty painful. Getting software on this thing is a pain. But with some work (and a lot of head banging) I got a version of MS Word on the Mac. Now to just get the MS Word files. to my M1 Mac.

The makers of the BlueSCSI also have a fancy utility, that can copy raw files from the SD card, to the Mac’s disk image. This utility runs on the Mac SE itself, and is super handy. It just didn’t work. Turns out I just had to update my BlueSCSI, and then it worked.

Exporting a document as a “Text Only With Line Breaks” file, I could transfer it to the SD card, and open it on my M1 Mac. It didn’t work. Neither cat or any program knew what to do with it. There was an easy fix. Just add “.txt” to the end, and boom, Finder could read the file.

Writing A Post

Now I that I have a working solution, I fired up MS Word, and got to writing. So yes, this blog post was written on a Macintosh SE. Here’s a pic for proof.

Excuse the webcam pic, my iPhone really didn’t like taking a picture of the CRT.