Thank you for your help! I didn't see any noticeable leakage in either machine, but I'll give both of them a more thorough run-down tonight (including a proper cleaning of the SIMM and ROM sockets; in my initial testing, I re-seated but did not clean).
I'm a little nervous about trying to recap the logic board, if it comes to that; as I said, I've recapped antique radios before, but that's the comparative equivalent of playing T-ball. All the components are huge, and are connected with actual free-floating wires. There's lots of space to work with, and you never have to worry about a sloppy solder job bridging unwanted connections, and each circuit is easy to trace by sight.
At this point, I'm thinking I should probably get an external floppy for my laptop, so I don't have to use my office computer to make disks. I found some directions online for setting up classic MacOS floppies under both OSX and Windows, so hopefully I can get that figured out myself.
Once I do get everything up and running, I'd like to start looking at what I can do with these things. More RAM and bigger hard drives both seem relatively easy to source, and I don't think it'll be too terribly difficult to find older SCSI drives if I ever decide I want to add an external hard drive or CD-ROM. But from what I've read on the forums so far, it seems like pretty much all the other desirable upgrades (ethernet card, accelerator cards, video upgrade--particularly with the harness for the internal CRT) are relatively difficult to find.
It doesn't look like there's any way to get the SE/30s to talk to my printer in its current configuration (a Time Capsule serves as the core of our home network, with an Epson printer/scanner/copier plugged into its USB port so my girlfriend and I can both print to it without swapping cables around). It would be nice to get the two machines online though, if for no other reason than to save myself the effort of having to download all the software I need on my laptop and transfer it to floppy disks. From what I understand, more RAM and an accelerator card are pretty much must-haves in order to make that worthwhile, so it would seem a lot less complicated to use an external ethernet device if possible, rather than chaining PDS cards.
Are there any ethernet adapters that will plug into the AppleTalk ports? One of the SE/30s came with an external fax/modem, but our apartment isn't even wired for a land line.
Is my understanding of all that correct? And if so: is there still a good source of SE/30 compatible expansion cards? I'm thinking either accelerator boards for both of them, or an accelerator for one and a graphics upgrade for the other... though the required parts seem like they'd be difficult to find.
eBay, Craigslist, and Freecycle have not been very fruitful, and there don't really seem to be any online stores dedicated to Macs this old. That was actually kind of surprising, since there are plenty of antique radio supply shops online, and those radios are a good 50 years older than these compact Macs.
I'm a little nervous about trying to recap the logic board, if it comes to that; as I said, I've recapped antique radios before, but that's the comparative equivalent of playing T-ball. All the components are huge, and are connected with actual free-floating wires. There's lots of space to work with, and you never have to worry about a sloppy solder job bridging unwanted connections, and each circuit is easy to trace by sight.
At this point, I'm thinking I should probably get an external floppy for my laptop, so I don't have to use my office computer to make disks. I found some directions online for setting up classic MacOS floppies under both OSX and Windows, so hopefully I can get that figured out myself.
Once I do get everything up and running, I'd like to start looking at what I can do with these things. More RAM and bigger hard drives both seem relatively easy to source, and I don't think it'll be too terribly difficult to find older SCSI drives if I ever decide I want to add an external hard drive or CD-ROM. But from what I've read on the forums so far, it seems like pretty much all the other desirable upgrades (ethernet card, accelerator cards, video upgrade--particularly with the harness for the internal CRT) are relatively difficult to find.
It doesn't look like there's any way to get the SE/30s to talk to my printer in its current configuration (a Time Capsule serves as the core of our home network, with an Epson printer/scanner/copier plugged into its USB port so my girlfriend and I can both print to it without swapping cables around). It would be nice to get the two machines online though, if for no other reason than to save myself the effort of having to download all the software I need on my laptop and transfer it to floppy disks. From what I understand, more RAM and an accelerator card are pretty much must-haves in order to make that worthwhile, so it would seem a lot less complicated to use an external ethernet device if possible, rather than chaining PDS cards.
Are there any ethernet adapters that will plug into the AppleTalk ports? One of the SE/30s came with an external fax/modem, but our apartment isn't even wired for a land line.
Is my understanding of all that correct? And if so: is there still a good source of SE/30 compatible expansion cards? I'm thinking either accelerator boards for both of them, or an accelerator for one and a graphics upgrade for the other... though the required parts seem like they'd be difficult to find.
eBay, Craigslist, and Freecycle have not been very fruitful, and there don't really seem to be any online stores dedicated to Macs this old. That was actually kind of surprising, since there are plenty of antique radio supply shops online, and those radios are a good 50 years older than these compact Macs.