Tracing the 'SE' name through historyWhile the iPhone SE may be a great small phone, it's not the first Apple product to wear the "SE" badge.
Mac SE
The first time an Apple product wore the SE badge was way back in 1987, when the Macintosh SE rolled off the line.
The Macintosh SE brought expansion to the "compact" Mac form factor via an expansion slot, in addition to the SCSI port that arrived with the Macintosh Plus the previous year. The SE also helped bring ADB into the world and could be fitted with a second floppy drive or an internal hard drive.
(It also came with a fun Easter Egg embedded into the ROM. Hat tip to John Siracusa for that trip down memory lane.)
The Macintosh SE would be replaced by the "SE FDHD." This alphabet soup of a Mac was more or less a recycled, 8MHz SE with a 1.4MB SuperDrive (!) instead of the 800KB floppy disk drive found on the original SE.
The Macintosh SE/30 is the best known of the three machines with the name. The SE/30 is fondly remembered by the likes of John Gruber and John ...
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Tracing the 'SE' name through history
