Dumb AppleTalk Question: Networking Classic and SE

[sfiera]

System 6 doesn’t have built-in file-sharing, though the Classic Mac Networking guide and vintageapple.org site list some System-6 compatible server software:

• AppleShare v2
  
• EasyShare demo (10 minute time limit)
  
• Oscar, SingleShare, Public Folder…
  

I don’t have experience with any of these options. AppleShare apparently requires a dedicated install, so while you could have two System 6 Folders, it might make more sense to have System 6/7 Folders, and use System 7’s built-in sharing.

 

[cheesestraws]

AppleShare apparently requires a dedicated install

Yeah, in my experience the dedicated AppleShare server is a bit of a pain to have coexisting with a workstation installation.

 

[MichaelLAX]

Read these:

http://www.atpm.com/8.07/system6.shtml

https://lowendmac.com/2018/macs-sharing-files-with-other-macs-old-or-new/

and for overkill, here:

http://www.applefool.com/se30/

I love my new Floppy EMU (although admittedly I am using it for Apple II)!

 

[Garrett]

I think it's pretty clear that I won't be able to network these two computers together without additional software or upgrading one of them to System 7. And, since I don't have a floppy drive, FloppyEmu/SCSI-2-SD or anything of the sort, that's not going to happen. (Not to mention the FloppyEmu would essentially make AppleTalk and networking essentially useless, at least for what I want to do.)

I thought AppleTalk and file sharing was standard on pretty much all Macintosh models going back to the early models. I guess not...

 

[Dog Cow]

I think it's pretty clear that I won't be able to network these two computers together without additional software or upgrading one of them to System 7. 

I thought AppleTalk and file sharing was standard on pretty much all Macintosh models going back to the early models. I guess not...

Once you've enabled AppleTalk on both computers and connected them with a cable, they're networked! That was the big innovation of AppleTalk in 1984 and 1985: it was the world's first zero-conf networking system. You are right in saying that AppleTalk is standard on all Macintosh models back to the Mac 128K. But file sharing has a more complicated history (because it's complicated to implement file sharing because of permissions, locking, etc), and AppleShare did not emerge until 1987, though third parties had file sharing and disk sharing systems before then.

Apple in 1984 also had plans for dedicated file server that was based on a stripped-down Mac 128K. This never made it past prototype stage.

 

[cheesestraws]

I thought AppleTalk and file sharing was standard on pretty much all Macintosh models going back to the early models. I guess not...

Once you've enabled AppleTalk on both computers and connected them with a cable, they're networked

Yup, this.  Or, to put it another way: there's a difference between being able to send messages from computer to computer and being able to share files between them, and the first has to happen before the second can.  And there is also a difference between being able to access shared content from a computer and be able to actually share that content without any extra software.  Perhaps as an analogy here, pretty much every modern OS comes with a web browser, but not all of them come with a web server.  "I can use shared volumes and file shares from very early machines" and "I can't share files until System 7" are not actually contradictory statements.

Perhaps tiresome detail:

This was especially true of the older Macs, where resources were sufficiently limited a lot of the time that you would almost always want to put aside a whole computer to do your file sharing server duties, especially given the lack of multitasking on the early Macs.  And as @Dog Cow mentioned, the original plan for this was to have a whole separate product for this use, which would just sit there and JFDI, kind of like a networked external hard disc.  In fact, if I remember correctly, for a while this was the approach Apple was going to take to hard disc storage.

After that plan, there was the early AppleShare server software, but this required a machine to be dedicated to it.  Again, think of the analogy with the web server here; the software was available quite early, but not bundled.  It wasn't until System 7 that being a file sharing server was bundled with the core OS.  And it isn't a coincidence that this came along at the same time that multitasking became non-negotiable.  File Sharing under System 7 is actually implemented as a background-only application that runs all the time.  And this in its turn is because Apple were only targeting Macs that had enough grunt (especially memory) to be able to actually multitask, which also by knock-on means they had enough memory and grunt to mostly share files.