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OMG - Zip 100 works with High Sierra (vintage to modern Mac challenge)

jjclay

Active member
I guess it's lockdown boredom or something - that and I've been trying to boot a vintage Mac Plus with external drives (which it does with a Zip100 SCSI and recent enough ROMs).

With a spare Zip 100 USB drive kicking about, I wondered if I'd still be able to read & modify my bootable Zip 100 System 6.0.8 disk on my Power Macintosh 5,1 (2010 vintage) running OS X 10.13.6 High Sierra. To my utter shock, it mounted flawlessly first time. Even dragging the Zip to the trash to eject, and auto re-mounting works.

Unfortunately, it is read-only (it's a MacOS Standard format disk) - but it did format as a Mac OS Extended volume to enable writing. But since that's not compatible with Vintage Mac booting, I'll leave it out there as an "interesting but not entirely useful" fact. 

What is the most surprising vintage peripheral you've managed to get working on a more modern Mac, and do you use it for file transfer between Vintage and modern Macs?

enjoy your day...

Joe

Screen Shot 2020-05-19 at 10.27.16.png

 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
It's the everlasting versatility of the humble serial port that always gets me (in a good way).  It almost feels like shipping files between worlds, sometimes, going from a modern MacBook to some ancient machine.

 

Byte Knight

Well-known member
What is the most surprising vintage peripheral you've managed to get working on a more modern Mac, and do you use it for file transfer between Vintage and modern Macs?
That's cool that you got a modern Mac to recognize an old Zip drive!

I guess it's more of an emulated vintage peripheral, but A2SERVER on a Raspberry Pi works as an AppleTalk file server for modern and old Macs and even an Uthernet-equipped Apple IIgs!  That's my go-to method for transferring files to and from all of my old Macs.

 

Juror22

Well-known member
What is the most surprising vintage peripheral you've managed to get working on a more modern Mac, and do you use it for file transfer between Vintage and modern Macs?
I don't know that it is very surprising, but I use a USB floppy drive attached to my High Sierra MBP to write files to a floppy and then read the file off of the floppy onto my LCIII, running 7.1.

The floppy is formatted for MS-DOS and I have PC Exchange on the LCIII.  I have to fix the filename when it arrives, but to quickly move a couple of files, it is pretty handy.

 

jjclay

Active member
I’ve used this approach in the past too, and you’re right for a couple of quick files it works well.

For larger files I used SCSI2SD but am also experimenting with a LocalTalk bridge - was aiming to keep my archives on my Synology NAS, which is great to access from Mac OS X machines, but not classic systems. For that I have a G4 Power Mac or my trusty Pismo PowerBook acting as my Classic & Mac OS X “bridge” (i.e. firing up Classic environment as needed). Also experimenting with a Farallon EtherTalk bridge, which I’ve had some success with but really need to get my versions of AppleTalk and Mac OS X (file sharing) sorted...

Looking into the Raspberry Pi AppleShare server now too ;-)  

 

Scott Baret

Well-known member
Nice work with this! 

I have a Keyspan serial adapter sitting around...wonder what it would take to get an ImageWriter II going on Catalina? 

 

jjclay

Active member
Now that would be cool (and is a potential fresh batch of colour ribbons an incentive?)

My boys think “laser printers” when they want to print. Would be great to show them how it used to be done (with lots of noise and time!)...I have an old ImageWriter II on my “get it working” project list I’ll have to take a look at.

 

cheesestraws

Well-known member

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
Those ghostscript drivers for the ImageWriter were very basic. No color support or anything fancy. Just black and white.

 

uridium

Well-known member
LaserJet 4000N printer with correct EPS font downloading and conversion and spooling working with the printer's hard drive module.

 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
It’s not Mac related but I was working on connecting my commodore 1541 disk drive from 1987 to my 2019 windows 10 PC. 

 

LaPorta

Well-known member
Weirdest I’ve done: hooked a Classic to a SCSI to FireWire converter, turned on the Classic. Connected the FW to an iMac. Fired up the iMac. The Classic’s internal HD mounted on the iMac.

 

Hopfenholz

Well-known member
I have a really quite nifty USB pen drive that has both a USB-a and a USB-C connector

Is it mounts and works perfectly with read write access on both my M1 MacBook Air and my PB G4 12” running 9.2.2

 
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