The 800k format is very proprietary, I'd be surprised if there was any way that stock
IBM hardware could write it, no matter what the programming tricks were. More data was
packed on the outer tracks than the inner tracks (done so that they didn't have to
change the Lisa ROMs (expecting 400k single-sided) according to rumor). The 1.44s can be
done on any machine that has DD or RAWRITE or anything similar, provided that it also has
a 1.44 MB mechanism. All '030+ macs have SuperDrives, as do SE-FDHD, LC, and
"upgraded" IIs with the IIx ROMs (fair number of upgrades were sold by Apple).
For an OS, I'd use either 6.0.8 (very fast, can turn MultiFinder off,
"classic" look but won't do Virtual Memory or 32-bit addressing (max
memory=8MB, everything else is ignored)) or 7.1 PRO (fastish, and you can patch in much of
the stuff that's nice in 7.5/7.6). If you're running 7, be sure to get Mode32,
available free+legal. ROMs from the pre-IIci era aren't fully 32-bit, so they have
problems if you turn on 32-bit addressing. A/UX also runs on the SE/30, it's the only
compact Mac that can run it. For these old beasts, assuming that you aren't going to
be a heavy Photoshop/PageMaker user, 16-20 MB of RAM works just fine with 7.1. System 6
won't see anything over 8. Remember to get your long-blade Torx-15 and case cracker,
and to unplug SCSI, power, etc. before trying to slide out the logic board.
Scott Quinn (SE(6.0.8), II (6.0.8), IIci (7.1), Quadra 950 (pegasys, A/UX 3.1), Quadra
700 (7.6)).
P.S. The LC is weird because of several things: 020 but no PMMU option, 16-bit data bus,
only will run up to 10MB RAM and 1/3 ht HDD, funky nonstandard video that doesn't run
on all monitors. The only excuse I can think of for Apple was that they didn't want to
eclipse the II in power. The 24-bit addressing bug in ROM I can find no excuse for- the
68000 was designed with a 32-bit outside address bus successor in mind (full internal
32-bit registers)- they must have just been lazy.