Macintosh SE
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Everything about this computer was loud. The hum of the cooling fan, the whirr of the hard disk, the clack of the mechanical keyboard. This would have been Lesley Wyatt’s experience as she booted up her Macintosh SE at the Cambridge Edition in 1987. By today’s standards it is a dinosaur.
It has a nine inch black and white display, and a hard disk with 20 MB of storage (less than most USB keys today). It was expensive too. By the time the Cambridge Edition had paid off their investment at something like 18% interest, it had cost them almost $30,000. It became known locally as “the smallest and most expensive computer in New Zealand”.
Yet Lesley described it as the greatest investment ever. She explained, “… it ended my seven-year love-hate relationship with that beast of a temperamental phototypesetter.” She was able to style the fonts and paragraphs of her copy in a way that had never been possible before, insert words and phrases with the click of a mouse and see the text on-screen in a manner reasonably like how it would appear in print.
If you were to use this computer today perhaps the most striking difference, other than the noise, would be that you can’t add hyperlinks in your writing. That idea had been around for a couple of decades by the time the Macintosh SE came out, but Tim Berners-Lee wouldn’t develop the first web browser until 1989, a year after this computer was manufactured.
- Accession No: CM2464/26
- Maker: Apple
- Where: USA
- When: 1987
- Materials: Plastic, metal, glass
- Measurements: 32 x 30 x 32cm
Discover more
A History of the Cambridge Edition by Lesley Wyatt https://cambridgemuseum.org.nz/history-cambridge-edition/
Our vintage computers – National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātautanga o Aotearoa – https://natlib.govt.nz/collections/digital-preservation/ndha-tools-and-resources/our-vintage-computers