This web site runs on a Macintosh SE, one of the little all-in-one "classic" Macintoshes. It's a model that had already been discontinued when the World Wide Web was created in the early 90's. It has the same basic horsepower as the original 1984 Mac. And yet, it's still capable of acting as a personal web server.

The Mac SE has a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 8MHz, and I've installed a full complement of 4MB RAM in this one. The SE was the first Mac to include a built-in hard drive, though earlier models could connect to an external unit. This machine has a 40MB drive, and it's the "FDHD" version of the SE, which means it has a high-density (1.44MB) diskette drive, also capable of reading PC disks. The monitor is a modest 9-inch screen displaying 512x384 resolution, in black and white (no shades of grey). It's connected to the internet via an Asante EN/SC 10T, an ethernet adapter that takes advantage of the high-speed (by 1980's standards) SCSI expansion port available on the back.

While this sounds incredibly primitive, this is the hardware platform that put PageMaker on the map (and in doing so, put Macs in a lot of print and design shops, where they're still considered standard equipment). Not to mention that the Mac SE ran earlier versons of Freehand, Illustrator, Quark Xpress, PowerPoint, Word, FileMaker, and others. Well-written software can get a lot out of hardware like this.

This server uses no "upgrade" tricks, like processor replacements or external storage. It's definitely not a modern Mac or PC stuffed into an old case (not that there's anything wrong with doing that for kicks). Even the add-on ethernet adapter is roughly contemporary with the SE. See the FAQ page for more info about the hardware involved.

The operating system is System 7.0.1 with MacTCP installed. OpenTransport is easier to work with (especially when assigning a static IP address, which requires some decimal-to-binary-to-decimal arithmetic), but it requires System 7.1 or later. The web server software is MacHTTP, the first web server developed for the Mac OS. It's a free package, again being maintained and enhanced by its original programmer, so I'm using a rather recent version of it. It's a good tool for keeping Macs that aren't capable of running OS X or modern graphics software from becoming landfill. My OS and hardware level are actually lower than MacHTTP's official minimum requirements... but it works. I use Fetch 2 to FTP files to/from this box. (For some reason, Fetch 3 crashes on me.) The screen saver (important, since I can't simply turn the monitor off) is Moire, a classic abstract-geometry utility from the SE's heyday. There's also a copy of Microsoft Works on this box, but I don't have any use for it, so its mostly just taking up a little disk space. I have a screen capture available.

See the FAQ page for more tips about software.

On occasions when I have to shut down "Snapper", the Mac SE that runs this site, I usually redirect traffic to "Dinah" my Mac Quadra, which was the final model to use the 680x0 architecture that the SE is based on, and qualifies as an "old Mac". On rare occasions, I'll redirect traffic to either "Diana" my Linux server, or "Oliver" my Mac G5. My intent in doing this isn't to deceive anyone, but to keep from giving people "site not responding" errors or have the site de-listed from search engines. Because Snapper sits behind a firewall with only one external IP address, you can't access it directly on port 80. If you try (such as when Netcraft probes it to determine what OS it's running), you'll reach Diana, who'll redirect you to Snapper through a different port; the direct URL for this site is http://oldmac.toddverbeek.com:8012

© 2004, Todd VerBeek