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512K(e) Online

sutekh

Well-known member
Greetings! Long time 68K owner / user, occasional forum lurker, and recent member here. After a several year 68K hiatus, I managed to find a bit of free space and spare time to devote to this former hobby :)

For the past 25 years I've been in possession of my father's 512K, which he purchased new in 1984 fully accessorized. After years of collecting bits and pieces, I finally realized a long-time dream of getting it online  [8D]  Current config / accessories as follows:
 

  • Mac Plus ROMs
  • MacSnap 548E 2MB RAM board
  • HD20 Harddrive
  • 2 x 800K Floppies (int / ext)
  • Shiva FastPath 4 Appletalk to IP router
  • System 6.0.8



I wish the MacLynx or Wanna-Be text browsers worked on the 68000 platform, but c'est la vie. I'll have to make do with IRC, EMail, and Telnet... I know this is old hat and has been done plenty of times before, but that hasn't stopped me from geeking out on it :)

P.S., His hostname on my local domain is Steve. That's Bill to his left, an also very much online XT.
 

FatMacOnline.jpg

 
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PB145B

Well-known member
Wow, that’s a nice rig! Can’t go wrong with a good old IBM XT and a Mac 512. Two classics. I also give you extra points for having a Microsoft green-eyed mouse. :)  I’m also quite jealous of that IBM 5154 monitor!

 

sutekh

Well-known member
Cool setup! Any estimate on how many K/sec download you get on the 512Ke?
In a word? Slow! In the attached image of me grabbing something off of my local *nix FTP server, I'm getting a pretty consistent ~64kb/s. Still beats the heck of the floppy shuffle though, and is plenty fast enough for any of the small files and ancient software this 'ol fella is capable of using. I also have it connected via AppleShare to my LCIII, so moving data to / from it has never been easier!

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Crutch

Well-known member
Slow?? That’s fast as blazes, you can move a whole 800k desk in less time than it’s taken me to tap out this sentence  :)   nice setup, I wasn’t familiar with that Shiva bridge. It plugs into the serial port I assume? Always figured I needed scsi for this type of thing. 

 

sutekh

Well-known member
Slow?? That’s fast as blazes, you can move a whole 800k desk in less time than it’s taken me to tap out this sentence  :)   nice setup, I wasn’t familiar with that Shiva bridge. It plugs into the serial port I assume? Always figured I needed scsi for this type of thing. 
Slow is relative :)  Compared to 10Mb ethernet or even what Phonenet hardware should be capable of, it's slow. As you say though, compared to floppy transfers it's wicked fast and super convenient!

It plugs into the serial port, yes--more specifically, it's intended to terminates one end of an Appletalk physical network zone.  It has an AppleTalk DB9 on one side and a selectable AUI or BNC Ethernet connector on the other. Considering when it was made, it's a phenomenally sophisticated little piece of gear. Has it's own 68K CPU that runs a proprietary network OS, and via its config utility (which uploads a new OS image and config) it can be setup for basic bridging, or as a full-on layer-3 router. It even has an internal DHCP server! It was designed to bridge large corporate / academic Appletalk physical networks with then new and shiny ethernet, and as I understand it, they were priced accordingly when new ($$$). I bought it on eBay a few years ago from someone who clearly had no idea what it was, and while what I'm now asking it to do here is pretty far beneath its station, it works great!  :)

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cheesestraws

Well-known member
Compared to 10Mb ethernet or even what Phonenet hardware should be capable of, it's slow
It's not that bad a throughput, given that you've got two sets of encapsulation and very small packets going on.  How fast do you get over AFP/DDP?

 
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