Before Apple had its own stores, it forced all its network of authorised service providers to keep a minimum stock of spare parts. A few years ago (well… probably a decade) I got some leftover spare parts for free from a shop that was closing. In the past weekend I took some pictures of the two revisions of the Macintosh SE motherboards.

There are two versions of the board: one for the first Macintosh SE released in March 1987 with a 800KB floppy drive, and one for the Macintosh SE FDHD released in August 1989 with a 1.44MB high density (that’s the meaning of HD in the model name) floppy drive (that of course is what FD means).

A sheet of paper was included in the later boxes, to remind the technician that a faulty motherboard had to be replaced with one of the same type.

The language codes were those used by Apple for everything that was localized in a foreign language (system software, manuals, keyboards, and so on). “Z” meant “International English”, F for French, D for German, T for Italian.

There’s a small drawing and reference table to recognise the two boards: the major differences are in the two ROMs, disk controller, and battery.

Here’s an high res PDF of the same sheet.

Macintosh SE, motherboard 661-0526

ROM low: 342-0353; ROM high: 342-0352; disk controller: IWM 344-0043; inline battery.

Look at this lovely VARTA battery… this will be removed in the next few days to avoid any damage to the motherboard.

And this is his majesty the Motorola 68000. You don’t see those shiny pins so often nowadays.

Here’s the rear of the motherboard: ADB x2, floppy, SCSI, serial/printer x2, audio out.

Macintosh SE FDHD, motherboard 661-0536

ROM low: 342-0702; ROM high: 342-0701; disk controller: SIWM 344-0062; battery holder.