Hello
I suppose I ought to introduce myself briefly. I love using Modern Macs, and I have hardly used the "Classic" compact models, except for a brief interlude with an old 128 or 512 which I purchased second hand at a market in the early/mid 90's, inside it was signed by all the early developers and it had 4 or 5 disks which it kept asking me to insert. At the time I worked on Unix in the city (London), and quickly lost interest in classic Macs and sold it again, I think looking back, because there was no help or support and I knew very few Mac users at that time, Here we are in 2010, I am a avid Mac user and recently purchased 80 macs for our school, love em I do ... and I am delighted that they now use Unix.
A few weeks ago I bought 2 classic Macs on a retro journey on eBay and I'm back were I was in the 90's wondering how to use them. I had hoped to get them working for Fun and Music, since it always appeared during the late 80's and early 90's that anything to do with music was being done on a Mac. My son plays guitar and drums and so i imagined I might find a simple use for these Compact Macs. Subconsciously I think this idea originates from me watching a UB40 music video where I saw them using a Mac as, I am only guessing, a sequencer, and I thought I might try and reproduce that bit of classic mac / music nostalgia on my SE / Classic
I have a 1988 - Mac SE with 4 Mb RAM and a 8 Mb hard drive, ( I am sure it's 10 or 20Mb and it's wrongly formatted) ,
The SE uses 800K floppies, and I thing I have 3 working with very little on it although I have the handbook / guide,
it has Claris Works installed
I also have a 1990 Mac Classic with 1Mb RAM and 10 or 20Mb hard drive.
The Classic uses 1.4Mb floppies and I have the original Disks
Original Box, and packaging, and manuals with Hyper Card
Microsoft Word 4.00b
I have ordered a Joystick and external SCSI disk, which if they works will allow me to copy and backup what is on the Classic and SE, I would like to backup what I have before I begin to play. Another way forward for me now is to get a 100MB SCSI Zip Drive as soon as I see a suitable one on ebay.
I have so many questions that I hardly know where to start but I have done a fair amount of research, enough to know that OSX 10.6.x has dropped support for HFS and that there are some really cool sites for getting files like "The Macintosh Garden", I get the occasional image copied over to a 1.4Mb floppy and get it to run on the Classic, but so many of the file types do not appear to work on my floppies, (I can't get them copied over). I have also given up trying to get stuff copied to the 800k disks.
I found a key combination which I used on the Classic and it boots into some sort of ROM disk, I can see how this might be useful for certain purposes, the Classic also has an interrupt key and a programmers key on the side but I cant see how that will be of any use to me.
I have found a ton of info on this website, but I have not seen (or understood) exactly how I go about getting software on to disk, for use on these early Macs, so if you could point me to a guide I would be delighted to continue my retro mac journey.
Impatiently I have downloaded Mini vMac and am quite impressed with the *.dsk disks which are available on the net, for example I got a copy of Professional Composer working. Some of the software and files I download are *.img and the occasional *.hqx - I have had more success with the Mini vMac than I have with the SE or Classic, but I imaging there may be a way of getting software from the vMac to the SE or Classic Mac?
Questions: (Taking into account how tricky it is to communicate with a 800k floppy and a 1.4Mb floppy)
How do I create image disk or get the software installed on a 1.4Mb for use on the Classic Mac, once I get it on the Classic I imagined I would copy it on to a 800k disk and then move it over to the Mac SE?
Can the SE and the Classic be Networked so that I can copy between them?
I guess another way of phrasing these questions would be to ask : If you had a Mac SE and a Mac Classic how would you go about making them useful, assuming that you were interested in using them for Music and Fun Games?
kind regards
Roly
I suppose I ought to introduce myself briefly. I love using Modern Macs, and I have hardly used the "Classic" compact models, except for a brief interlude with an old 128 or 512 which I purchased second hand at a market in the early/mid 90's, inside it was signed by all the early developers and it had 4 or 5 disks which it kept asking me to insert. At the time I worked on Unix in the city (London), and quickly lost interest in classic Macs and sold it again, I think looking back, because there was no help or support and I knew very few Mac users at that time, Here we are in 2010, I am a avid Mac user and recently purchased 80 macs for our school, love em I do ... and I am delighted that they now use Unix.
A few weeks ago I bought 2 classic Macs on a retro journey on eBay and I'm back were I was in the 90's wondering how to use them. I had hoped to get them working for Fun and Music, since it always appeared during the late 80's and early 90's that anything to do with music was being done on a Mac. My son plays guitar and drums and so i imagined I might find a simple use for these Compact Macs. Subconsciously I think this idea originates from me watching a UB40 music video where I saw them using a Mac as, I am only guessing, a sequencer, and I thought I might try and reproduce that bit of classic mac / music nostalgia on my SE / Classic
I have a 1988 - Mac SE with 4 Mb RAM and a 8 Mb hard drive, ( I am sure it's 10 or 20Mb and it's wrongly formatted) ,
The SE uses 800K floppies, and I thing I have 3 working with very little on it although I have the handbook / guide,
it has Claris Works installed
I also have a 1990 Mac Classic with 1Mb RAM and 10 or 20Mb hard drive.
The Classic uses 1.4Mb floppies and I have the original Disks
Original Box, and packaging, and manuals with Hyper Card
Microsoft Word 4.00b
I have ordered a Joystick and external SCSI disk, which if they works will allow me to copy and backup what is on the Classic and SE, I would like to backup what I have before I begin to play. Another way forward for me now is to get a 100MB SCSI Zip Drive as soon as I see a suitable one on ebay.
I have so many questions that I hardly know where to start but I have done a fair amount of research, enough to know that OSX 10.6.x has dropped support for HFS and that there are some really cool sites for getting files like "The Macintosh Garden", I get the occasional image copied over to a 1.4Mb floppy and get it to run on the Classic, but so many of the file types do not appear to work on my floppies, (I can't get them copied over). I have also given up trying to get stuff copied to the 800k disks.
I found a key combination which I used on the Classic and it boots into some sort of ROM disk, I can see how this might be useful for certain purposes, the Classic also has an interrupt key and a programmers key on the side but I cant see how that will be of any use to me.
I have found a ton of info on this website, but I have not seen (or understood) exactly how I go about getting software on to disk, for use on these early Macs, so if you could point me to a guide I would be delighted to continue my retro mac journey.
Impatiently I have downloaded Mini vMac and am quite impressed with the *.dsk disks which are available on the net, for example I got a copy of Professional Composer working. Some of the software and files I download are *.img and the occasional *.hqx - I have had more success with the Mini vMac than I have with the SE or Classic, but I imaging there may be a way of getting software from the vMac to the SE or Classic Mac?
Questions: (Taking into account how tricky it is to communicate with a 800k floppy and a 1.4Mb floppy)
How do I create image disk or get the software installed on a 1.4Mb for use on the Classic Mac, once I get it on the Classic I imagined I would copy it on to a 800k disk and then move it over to the Mac SE?
Can the SE and the Classic be Networked so that I can copy between them?
I guess another way of phrasing these questions would be to ask : If you had a Mac SE and a Mac Classic how would you go about making them useful, assuming that you were interested in using them for Music and Fun Games?
kind regards
Roly
