MacGeek

[mandysee_mandydo]

So I had myself a little geek binge with my Macs. It all started innocently enough when I couldn't download After Dark 4.0 Set 2 from Macintosh Garden. I thought to myself, "Self, you have an old SE with a bunch of cool old games that you could run on OS 9. Why don't you put your geekiness to the test and transfer them to the iMac?" Here's the trouble: the iMac has no floppy drive. The SE has no Ethernet adapter. How do I transfer the files?

Method 1 - Install an Ethernet adapter in the SE:
I do have one for the SE in storage somewhere, believe it or not. The trouble with this approach is that you need a super-long screwdriver to get in to the screws in the handle to remove the case. Alas, I do not have this tool. For now, installing the Ethernet adapter will not happen. I may be able to find or craft such a tool at a later date.

Method 2 - Use a connection between the modems:
I do have a painfully slow 14.4 modem for my SE. My iMac has an internal modem. I could connect the two modems directly with a normal telephone cord and use ZTerm on both machines, setting up the iMac to answer the dialing SE. This would give me a connection between the two for file transfers but not Internet access for the SE. Additionally, ZTerm is not installed on the SE and if I had a way to grab the files I needed off the Internet and put them on the SE to make this happen, this issue would be a moot point. So this won't work.

Method 3 - Zip drives:
I have a USB Zip drive connected to my iMac. I have a SCSI Zip drive for my Windows PC that I hooked up to my SE. Unfortunately my SE didn't like the Zip drive, to the point where on booting it would give me the bomb with an unexpected "Finder" error. Zip drives are out. Plus this wouldn't have any network connectivity involved which simply makes it just plain ungeek.

Method 4 - The Gatorbox:
I also happen to have a couple of Cayman Gatorboxes in storage. This would work fine if I had a way to convert the XCVR or BNC connections to CAT5 Ethernet. Which I don't. So while I have all the AppleTalk gear I could ever want to set up an entire LocalTalk network of 68k and PPC Macs to furnish a small corporation, my Gatorboxes are useless in making the conversion without the necessary adapters.

Method 5 - The Asante EN/SC adapter:
I don't own this, but there are always some on eBay for around $15 to $30. This handy little device will connect to the SE SCSI port and convert it into an Ethernet port. Then I can directly connect to my home network.

My guess is that I'll probably go with method 1 or method 5 when I do this. I really like method 4 but it seems silly to go through the trouble of setting up a Gatorbox for a single Mac. Back in the day when I had at least 4 SEs, a Mac Classic, a Mac Plus, an LCIII and an LC475, the Gatorbox(es) would have been ideal. That's why I had them. But when I found out that some of these machines no longer functioned and realized I hadn't the space to keep all of these machines, those dreams of the incredibly large and useless Mac LocalTalk network bridged to an Ethernet network were dashed. Too bad. I was going to get everything talking with a Linux box, including my Amiga 2000HD and probably the Apple IIe, Atari 130xe and Commodore 64s, too. At least one of the SEs found a nice home with quantumswordsmn.

Comments

[quantumswordsmn.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah? Try connecting your iMac to an Altair 8800, now THAT is a geek test my friend.

[srturtle.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there must be a way. I shudder to think of it, but their must.

[srturtle.livejournal.com]

Okay, here are the beginnings, but I can't be sure of this as I have no way to test it.

Hardware wise, it looks like the Altair 8800 could be set up on a Token Ring (IEEE 802.5 standard) network. There are bridges available that would allow one to connect an Ethernet device into a Token Ring network. So it is possible to network and Altair 8800 and iMac together physically.

Getting them to communicate and play nice with each other, well that's a different story. I suppose some sort of interpreter software could beprogrammed for the iMac, but how to go about it would be more than I would want to get into for this little theoretical exercise. Yikes! The Altair 8800 did offer BASIC as a higher level language, but as was the case with BASIC everyone and their brothers had their own flavor of BASIC so it is Altair BASIC that would be in use here.

Again, I'm sure there is a way, but I couldn't say specifically what that would be.

It is a geeky conundrum, though!

[quantumswordsmn.livejournal.com]

Just for kicks, about how expensive would it be to network them, minus the Altair and the iMac.

If you want the impossible, then try hooking up the Altair 8800, your iMac, and a computer running Windows ME... :P

[srturtle.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'm not sure. I would think the only place you're going to find Token Ring gear is on eBay, if that is even the right networking protocol. That's what it sounds like to me after reading through a description of networking Altairs I found on the DigiBarn website. The bridge to connect a 10BaseT node to the Token Ring network wasn't very expensive. Then the trick comes in time invested in developing software to handle the info sent to and from the Altair.

It is indeed impossible to network anything with Windows ME ;)