Trying to get my Color Classic online, & could use some

[Huxley]

Hi guys,

Okay, so I've gotten my beloved old Color Classic up and running with a Color Classic II (Performa 275?) motherboard, 36 megs of RAM, and System 7.5.3 (it's what came on the internal drive). So far, so good, but of course, I want to get her online. I bought an "Apple Ethernet LC

Twisted-Pair Card" from a gigantic online auction site (ahem), and after much frustration, anger, negative feedback and PayPal investigations on my part, the seller finally shipped the card, nearly a month since I bought it.

Anyway, I just installed the card onto the mobo and so far, so good (the little green light comes on when I connect it to my router), but I'm having some trouble with the software setup. When I go to the TCP/IP Control Panel, in the "Connect Via:" menu, I only have the choice of "AppleTalk (MacIP)" or "MacPPP", and there's no entry for Ethernet like I was expecting.

Am I missing a driver or extension or something? Any hints would be great!

Thanks,

Huxley

 

[Big Bird]

That's a pretty sweet CC you've got there. My guess is you're missing the networking software from system 7.5.3. I don't recall if it's installed with the default installation, particularly on Macs without built-in network hardware, but it's certainly an option that may have been omitted, cramped for hard disk space. You need, at minimum, Apple's driver (extension) for your ethernet card. I'd look up the exact file names in case you wanted to go the TomeViewer route if I didn't have my Quicksilver server temporarily burning a DVD project where I usually keep a 68k machine set up.

If you have the system disks, just run the Installer, choose to do a custom install, and select to update the networking software. If you don't have the system disks, you'll need to download and make them from Apple's website.

Also, do yourself a favor and install the free upgrade to System 7.5.5, also available online.

G'luck,

Cody

 

[Huxley]

That's a pretty sweet CC you've got there. My guess is you're missing the networking software from system 7.5.3. I don't recall if it's installed with the default installation, particularly on Macs without built-in network hardware, but it's certainly an option that may have been omitted, cramped for hard disk space. You need, at minimum, Apple's driver (extension) for your ethernet card. I'd look up the exact file names in case you wanted to go the TomeViewer route if I didn't have my Quicksilver server temporarily burning a DVD project where I usually keep a 68k machine set up.
If you have the system disks, just run the Installer, choose to do a custom install, and select to update the networking software. If you don't have the system disks, you'll need to download and make them from Apple's website.

Also, do yourself a favor and install the free upgrade to System 7.5.5, also available online.

G'luck,

Cody

Well, you know what they say about great minds...

I'm (re)installing 7.5.3 right now, so we'll see if that helps. Also, thanks for the tip - I'll update to 7.5.5, assuming that the 7.5.3 update works...

Thanks again - hopefully my next post will be from the Color Classic!

Huxley

 

[Huxley]

By the way, is it just me, or is it simply AWESOME that 7.5.3 is currently installing onto the internal drive on my Color Classic - the same drive that I'm currently booted from?! I just spent nearly an hour digging around in Google, trying to figure out how to burn a bootable System 7 CD, since I'd assumed that it wouldn't install onto the current boot disk.

Crazy stuff.

Huxley

 

[Big Bird]

Yeah, I love that about the Mac. Coming from an entirely PC background (by ignorance only), the feature that first wooed me to the Mac platform was the ability to pull a drive out of any machine, pop it in any other machine, and watch it boot. You just didn't see that on a PC. And the newly booted Mac had full hardware support, all the applications ran just as they did on the old machine, and it wasn't wildly unstable. Sheer bliss for someone tired of spending all his time reinstalling Windows on a host of machines. Of course, we lost all that in OS X (the biggest reason I objected to the switch at first), but I think it was overall a fair tradeoff.

For future reference, all you should need to make a bootable CD is to drop a (blessed) system folder from a setup disk onto a CD. The system folders from Apple's original install CDs can be transferred to any custom burned CD, as well as those on the setup or disk tools floppies/images. I keep "tech CDs" for every major system version handy, containing SSW installers, crucial upgrades, and repair tools. I liked to keep an empty ~690 MB partition on my CD burning Mac that I could install all the software on, test it if necessary, and burn the entire partition to a CD. If you don't have that luxury, Toast's temporary partitions are an excellent choice. Disk images and/or temporary partitions are the easiest way to keep the disc bootable once you burn it without a hassle.

 

[Huxley]

Woot, it's working! I'm actually posting this message from my Color Classic, using an old version of iCab. It's dirt slow right now, but the fact that it is working at all is kinda blowing my mind. So far, the only annoyance is that, while I'm typing this message, the poor Mac just can't keep up with the speed of my typing, and keeps dropping letters and words, so I'm typing v e r y s l o o o l y . . .

Thanks for the help, guys!

Huxley

 

[MacJunky]

pfft, it has ethernet... and a colour display as well as lots of RAM and a fast CPU!

Try on a Mac 128k - Plus or old ethernet-less PowerBook 1xx with around 10MB RAM or less.

You can use the CCII as a LocalTalk to ethernet gateway for the older machine though.

 

[MacMan]

Well done getting your Colour Classic online. The LC575 motherboard will be helping a great deal in terms of browsing since it has a '040 and 36MB RAM. The stock Colour Classic motherboard makes things impossibly slow (though I did once get mine to work with Netscape 2).

 

[ChristTrekker]

Well done getting your Colour Classic online. The LC575 motherboard will be helping a great deal in terms of browsing since it has a '040 and 36MB RAM. The stock Colour Classic motherboard makes things impossibly slow (though I did once get mine to work with Netscape 2).

Mine has the 575 board and maxxed RAM. I love it! It sits on the corner of my desk at work and I let it run the screensaver all day. Kind of a neat "retro art" sort of thing.

 

[MacMan]

Unfortunately LC575 motherboards are hard to get in the UK because as far as I'm aware the LC500 series did not ship here. My Colour Classic is still running with the original motherboard, but it is only really used for word processing by my father.