Released in March 1987, the $3700 Mac SE was Apple's attempt at a serious business-based Macintosh. It was pretty similar to the Mac Plus, the case design was only different in that it had ridges along the front and sported a new color. It had the same 68000 processor running at 8 MHz, but was 15 to 20% faster. it also had the same amount of memory shipped with it, 1 MB. The SE was very different in many ways though. If you had used any other Mac before the SE, there was one main thing you noticed, it was horribly loud. The Mac SE was the first to have a cooling fan, a cheap one at that, which made a terrible raquet. It began a long line of noisy Macs that prevails to this day. Also it included an extra drive bay. SE users could either install a hard drive (still not standard) or install another disk drive. It again doubled the ROM size, now at 256k. It also had the first expansion slot of any Mac, used for graphics, or such expansion capabilities. The SE also had te first standard Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) port for the Macintosh. Though the SE originally shipped with the same 800k disk drive as the 512Ke and Plus, later versions of the SE (with the annexed FDHD name) included Apple's new 1.4 MB SuperDrive disk drive, with the capability to read MS-DOS formatted disks with the proper software, this ability would not be implemented for two years though.

Code Names: Mac ±, PlusPlus, Aladdin, Freeport, Maui, Chablis.

Specifications:
Processor: Motorola 68000 processor running at 8 MHz (still same as Mac 128k).
Memory: included 1 MB of RAM, 256k ROM,
Drives: a Sony 800k 3.5" drive. A 1.4MB Apple SuperDrive could be added, as well as a 20MB or 40 MB 3.5" HD in it's second drive bay.
Display: built-in 9-inch diagonal, 512 by 342-pixel bitmapped display.
Expansion: 1 PDS slot. Extra drive bay for second floppy rive or HD.
Ports: Mouse port, two ADB connectors, two RS-232/RS-422 serial ports, SCSI interface, 96-pin expansion connector and sound port for external audio amplifier or headphones. Came with either ADB Keyboard or ADB Extended Keyboard.

Operating Systems:
Mac OS: came with System 4.1, supports System 2.0-7.01, 7.1, 7.5-7.51, 7.53-7.55.

Model in this Series:
Mac SE: basic system.
Mac SE FDHD: released two years later with Apple's 1.44 MB SuperDrive floppy drive (later renamed FDHD, sported nifty logo)

On the market for: 3 years, 8 months (SE); 1 year 2 months (SE FDHD).

Interesting Facts:
The relatively cheap cooling fan was very annoying to several SE users. Some did anything possible to get rid of it. There were several better cooling fans for the SE on the market but my favorite product was the Mac Chimeney. Literally, it was a chimmeney that allowed cool air to enter the SE into the CPU. A soon-to-be-scanned picture I saw of the product makes the SE look like a little Mac house!

If you hit the interrupt switch on any Mac SE, and type the string "G 41D89A" without parenthesis, you'll get a slide show of four pictures of the SE development team.

Resources and Related Links:
Apple's Technical Information Library
David Pogue's and Joeseph Schorr's Macworld Mac SECRETS.
Picture above from Sun Remarketing.