Hello from my wireless 1400cs

[MacMan]

I was lucky enough to find an Orinoco Gold card on eBay UK recently and managed to nab it for a very good price. I got it today and have set up a wireless connection on my PowerBook 1400cs with it. This is the first portable machine I've had working on my wireless network and it is absolutely amazing being able to move about the house whilst surfing the web on the 1400cs! The machine has 40MB RAM and System 7.6 which makes it a good machine for basic surfing with iCab. I am posting this message with it in fact.

Before buying the card I read a great online tutorial here. It goes through everything you need to know about wirelessly networking a 1400 or indeed any other older PCMCIA-equipped Macs.

Does anyone else here have a similar setup? I know that wgoodf runs his PowerBook 540c server through wireless which is very cool!

 

[wally]

I have four PB1400s that can be 802.11b connected. For daily use I have a PB1400c (MacOS 9.1) that has the Sonnet G3-333 upgrade, 64MB main memory, using a dedicated Proxim Skyline wireless card, that I am using now to post this. When not in use I just sleep the machine, so getting on the Internet is just a matter of unsleeping. I turn on my G4-400 Sawtooth (and wait some for 10.3.9 to load into 384 MB) only when I need a page that will not display right on my 1400, or when I want two really big CRT screens. The other PowerBooks (all MacOS 8.6, 48 MB or less memory) are generally used offline, but when I want to download something into them I stick in either a Farallon Skyline or an Orinoco Silver wireless card to get them briefly onto the Internet. Sometimes I use the other PowerBooks in peer to peer mode for experiments. Data movement between the PowerBooks (and my digital camera) is mainly done via PCMCIA flash memory adapter, although sometimes ZIP-100 media is used too. Being able to move my net access around the house and sometimes into the backyard is nice!

 

[Franklinstein]

I bought a stack of old standard-PCMCIA Buffalo AirStation cards a while ago. The driver allows me to use wireless on any 'Book running System 7.5+ with PC Card slots. Since I only have a fraction of my collection here in Japan, I use them mostly with my 2400, Kanga, and under OS 9 on my WallStreets and Lombards (I have a faster 11g CardBus card for OS X). If only I had the PCMCIA expansion for my 500-series machines, I'd use them on there, too.

But yeah, they work well. The only negative is that Classic Mac OS only supports 128-bit WEP encryption.

 

[steve30]

I have used Wireless on my 1400c with OS8.6, but not 7.

I tried to set it up recently with 7.5 but the driver doesn't seem to work properly. Do I need 7.6?

 

[MacMan]

If your wireless card is one of the Lucent cards / clones (Wavelan, Orinoco, Dell True Mobile etc) then you can use the driver found in the Driver Downloads section of this page: http://main.system7today.com/helpcenter.html .

This is the Lucent Wavelan driver which is different from the Orinoco driver. Since the cards are the same under the hood it doesn't matter which one you use but the Orinoco one (version 6) needs Mac OS 8.6 to work I believe. The Wavelan Gold driver is compatible with System 7.5.2 and up; I expect the Silver will be the same.

 

[steve30]

I have a WaveLAN card and used the WavLAN driver. I didn't download it from system7today but I'm pretty sure it is the same one. I will download it anyway and check.

It all works perfectly in 8.6 with the orinoco driver.

EDIT: I installed the 68k driver and it now seems to be working. I havn't tried accessing the internet from it, but printing over the network is fine.