Is there a beige Power Mac that can make 800k disks?

[EvieSigma]

Can you PM me all that advice though?

 

[just.in.time]

Hi,  to anyone else reading, previously my post had mentioned getting Ethernet cards in all Macs capable of it.  Hence itsvince's response.

Rare, kinda.  Expensive, depends on who is selling.  I picked mine up for a very fair price from a user here on the forums.  Also, I've seen some for the SE on eBay for reasonable prices.  That said, the Ethernet card for the SE/30 (which is a different card than used by the SE) does command quite the premium price.

That said, the card I got has the standard RJ-45 connector we know and love today, as well as coaxial and AAUI.  Not all cards have it, but it seems a decent number did have the modern RJ-45 connector.

 

[EvieSigma]

I have a bad National Semiconductor SE/30 card that Unknown K wants, but I keep forgetting to send it to him. Has a broken pin.

No RJ45 though, just that weird locking connector and a DB something.

 

[Gorgonops]

Arguably a solid alternative to an Ethernet card is an Ethernet/Local talk bridge, especially now that it's so trivial to set up Netatalk and MacIP services on a VM or Raspberry Pi. The performance will be inferior but a bridge and a pile of Phonenet adapters is a pretty cheap date compared to what Ethernet cards for some machines go for.

 

[just.in.time]

That would also work!  I really want to try the DreamPi setup once I get my Portable back up and running.  It has the dialup modem, and no option of ethernet was ever available to it.  It would be a great candidate for that option.

Still, if the Performa 630 or whatever it was that was mentioned earlier is already up and running, I am thinking it would be a great idea to add Ethernet to it.  As has been mentioned, the cards for it are (assuming it takes the card I think it does) fairly affordable on eBay right now ($20-$30).  It would make it a great go between machine and could act as an FTP host to receive software from any modern computer, and can then LocalTalk and/or make 800k/1.4mb floppies.

 

[Gorgonops]

It looks like A2SERVER is installing MacIPGW these days by default, so I guess I need to pull out my Plus and see if I can install TCP/IP support on it. Said Plus currently only has 2.5MB of RAM and System 6, so I don't know how much of the way of software I'll be able to run on it. It *seems* to be working because I was able to activate MacIP in the Marinetti stack that comes with its distribution of GS/OS 6.0.3, but I didn't have any software handy that would fit in the remaining RAM that could prove whether it was working.

 

[Gorgonops]

Still, if the Performa 630 or whatever it was that was mentioned earlier is already up and running, I am thinking it would be a great idea to add Ethernet to it.  As has been mentioned, the cards for it are (assuming it takes the card I think it does) fairly affordable on eBay right now ($20-$30)...

And, yeah, I did notice in another thread that two other people have "made offers" on the same auction I dropped into this thread a page or two back and got them for even less than the $25 he's asking as a BIN, I think it's sort of a no-brainer. Fitting the Performa with said card would give you a whole pile of options for using it as a bridge mac for an SE. (You can use the Performa to generate floppy disks for the SE downloaded from the web/ftp or from a more modern Appletalk server, you can run a printer cable between the Performa and the SE and use personal file sharing to get software directly to the SE, you could run the software Appletalk bridge software on the Performa so the SE could hit a Netatalk server directly...)

 

[bluesky6]

I had to answer the original question myself last year when I landed a Mac Plus and then got a Power Mac G3 Beige to get software onto 800K floppies.

I found that:

a. Yes, you can write 800k floppies on the G3's superdrive

b. The floppies can even boot on the Mac Plus

c. But if you then wrote one or more files onto the floppy after the initial copy, the floppy is no longer bootable. I'll admit that when I discovered that, I was running 9.x

d. A number disk images that is popular for Mac emulators cannot be used to create bootable floppies. At least, if memory serves, the disk copy utilities didn't even recognize these as disk images...

I forgot about the Appletalk approach. Isn't there an incompatibility issue between ancient Macs and the newer ones (e.g. PowerPC vs 68K)? A long time ago, I had a Mac II running as an Appletalk server to a bunch of compacts and had to deal with that, but my memory is very fuzzy.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Interesting, I haven't had any problems writing files to an 800k disk in 9.2 and making it unbeatable...