You can see the rest of the gang here: http://muezza.ca/cats.html
And don't remind me of the prices in Germany :). I remember seeing my first IIfx at our local Apple dealer, it cost about 35k German marks IIRC... a new VW Golf car was around 25k marks back then.
More details on everymac.com: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_classic/specs/mac_cla... https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_classic/specs/mac_se3...
I had an SE/30 many years ago (gave it to a friend in the late 90s) and used it to run A/UX. Good times :). Now I only have a Classic II which badly needs recapping...
For a lot of people, that's not going to matter. People seem to have the notion that old computers were only good for word processing and games. That is, more-or-less, what the Classic II was designed for. That is not what the SE/30 was designed for.
The reality is that machines like the SE/30 were targeted at organizations and professionals with deep pockets. Throw in a display adapter and a two page display, and it was used for desktop publishing. Throw in a network card, and it was used as a server. If the standard System Software wasn't good enough, there was even a option to run A/UX. Even something as simple as RAM demonstrates how fundamentally different these machines were. The Classic II was capped at 10 MB of RAM. The SE/30 was certified for 32 MB of RAM, but the hardware design accommodated 128 MB of RAM.
A Classic II can run almost any software that an SE/30 can, a bit more slowly and perhaps with an eye on the available memory. It would also be out of character for that machine. While basement tinkerers are not going to care about something being in character, collectors are going to care and collectors have a huge impact upon prices.
Do you think you would get a similar or diminished experience with e.g a raspberry pi and a little LCD screen etc that booted straight into a minivmac emulator? ... I must admit I get a sense of satisfaction from turning on certain old electronics, like the resonating "clung" of the e transformer in my amplifier when I flip the switch, so maybe that's all part of it, the sense of an appliance, something less fallible, and also the absence of all those layers of complexity under the emulator.
In this case? I enjoyed saving the Mac, fixing it, making a few minor upgrades along the way. Apple hardware and software integrates so well together and I think there’s a lot of reason to have the whole package. That said when using it I’m looking primarily at the screen alone.
I think it’s really subjective and depends on the person ultimately.
With vintage hardware, you are constrained by what the machine can do. With emulation, you are constraining what the machine can do. It does make a difference. To give you an example of what I mean:
I collected vintage hardware in my university days. It was a time when you could get something like a Mac IIfx for next to nothing and still expect it to work. Well, crunch time came and I found that I was getting far too distracted. A vintage Mac provided an ideal work environment since it was great for preparing technical documents and didn't have all of the distractions of the Internet. Boot it into System 6 with Multifinder disabled, and it reduced the distraction of other software installed on the machine. Doing something similar with an emulator simply would not have been as effective. It is too easy to escape the sandbox in a multitude of ways.
Is this a physical differentiation (i.e. based upon the capabilities of the hardware) or a psychological one? I really don't know and I really don't know if the distinction matters. The outcome is the significant part, and that outcome suggests physical hardware does make a difference.
Certainly, pulling out my PowerBook G3 Pismo is a significantly different experience than firing up SheepShaver or qemu_ppc running the same operating system.
I wonder if this is due to input latency, because no matter how good the emulator, input devices have gotten waaay slower due to all of the layers in between, before even getting to the emulator... unfortunately it's not really something you can throw money at with modern computers.
> PowerBook G3 Pismo
I owned one of those, that thing is capable of frying an egg for real!
Personally: the lower the “action to result” latency, the more compelling and tactile something is.
We all know about the sub 100ms “golden zone”, but if something is ~10ms (custom hardware with optimized software) it’s significantly more real to me, and if something is <1ms it’s almost irresistible.
Like; 100ms is the barrier to entry and it goes up logarithmically from there.
From everything I've read it seems that this is just not going to be solved any time soon, because the latency is distributed across so many layers, each contributing a little more. Even going beyond the input bus the older computers are lower latency in terms of how long it takes for a pixel to move on the screen based on the new coordinate. It's a shame this isn't something that can be solved even in a niche way without making completely different hardware... I guess an FPGA could possibly come close, but only if you also abandoned USB input devices and had a custom (simpler) input bus.
I think it’s because of him and others like him that we now have 240Hz displays, talk about OLED pixel responsiveness being much higher, and real industry progress around reducing the latency throughout the total pipeline.
I remember a time not that long ago when people were trying to argue that “the human eye sees at 60fps”. We’ve thankfully come a long way since then and I am hopeful for a future where we finally get lower latency than the old tech.