Many thanks for any/all help with this

James

Getting back to your actual question, presuming you are simply, like the rest of us, crazy, and actually want to network your Plus with your PCs. . .

Since the Plus doesn't have ethernet, your options are: SCSI to etherent adapter, (usually by Dayna), or Localtalk to Ethernet hardware bridge (Asante, Dayna, or Farallon) -which gives you the physical connection of ethernet, but only the performance of Localtalk. And finally, if you have another Mac in your network that does have ethernet, you could localtalk your Plus to that Mac, and run the LocalTalk Bridge software on that Mac, which will effectively put your Plus on the EtherLAN, but again at only Localtalk speeds. (Handy for internet access, though!)

Since you're talking about doing things that require software, I'm hoping your Plus has a couple hard drives hooked up to it, and that you're not planning on doing this from a pair of say, 400K floppies.

Presuming you've got external hard drives, start out with MacOS 7.5.3. It's a bit of a pain to get installed, but it works. You can go two ways: Install MacOS 7.5, then run the OS 7.5.3 revision 2 update, or if you can get ahold of an actual 7.5.3 bootable installer disk, just run that. But to do that you'll need a bootable 7.5 on another hard drive in order to boot and run the 7.5.3 installer.

Once you're running 7.5.3 on the Plus and you connect either a SCSI-Etherent adapter, or a Localtalk-Ethernet adapter, or network your Plus to an EtherLAN Mac running Localtalk Bridge, you can configure your Plus to use your router using the MacTCP control panel.

Once you're doing all that, any 68K telnet client should work fine (BetterTelNet FAT) on your Plus.

Swapping files with a PC requires that either your PC speak Mac (Appletalk), or your Mac speak PC (NetBeui or other protocol), or that you run an internet-based file server (FTP) on either the Mac or PC. It's probably easier to set up an FTP server on the PC and use a 68K ftp client on the Plus (Fetch), but there are 3rd party Appletalk solutions for PCs (Miramar's PCmacLAN) and the Server versions of Windows has Appletalk and Services For Macintosh built-in. Alternatively one can add PC protocols to a Mac using products like Thursby's DAVE or MacSOHO, but these aren't going to run on a Plus. Still, I'm a fan of MacSOHO, which adds NetBeui protocol to the Mac. Modern Macs running OSX can communicate to PCs over SMB. But that's out of the realm of your Plus.

When swapping files between Macs and PCs beware the typical cross-platform bugaboos like 8.3 filename conventions on PCs, use of nonstandard characters in filenames, and PCs ignorance of the resource fork in Mac files. (Either binhex all your files, or use a Win Server OS -NT server or Win2k server- which are Mac-file aware using Services for Macintosh.

Good basic info can be found at http://www.macwindows.com
but many solutions there will be beyond the capabilities of a Mac Plus.

Still, it can most certainly be done, if you're crazy and patient enough.

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Some info to get you started:
The Plus doesn't have any hardware ethernet, or any expansion ports to add an ethernet card. So to start off, my recommendation is that *if you have a genuine need or use for ethernet on a compact mac*, ...

Getting back to your actual question, presuming you are simply, like the rest of us, crazy, and actually want to network your Plus with your PCs. . .

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No, the Plus doesn't take any internal hard drives. With a Plus, you're all about external SCSI, and also, there's the Apple serial hard drive that plugs into the external floppy port. (if I recall, it also has a pass-through port to plug your external floppy into). If you want one I've got one you can have for the cost of shipping it. It has a form factor that has the same footprint of the compact Macs, so it normally goes underneath the Plus. I'd have to poke around to find it, it's around here *somewhere.* I don't recall what size drive is in them, 10 megs? 20 megs? Anyone?

I might be going out on a limb here, and anyone more recently familiar with a Plus can chime in, but I don't think a floppy-based OS has room for the extra network extensions needed for TCP/IP. I'd insist on a hard drive though.

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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it sure beats a blank stare for starting a conversation.

68k ParaMedic

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Mac Plus, is that the same as a 512k?

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Jobf.

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A few points: You'll definitely need 4Mb in the Plus, if hasn't got it already. 4x30pin 1mb SIMMs, and you need to snip a few resistors.

Hard drives: The Apple floppy drive hard drive is 20Mb. Theres more info about the drives you can get and their sizes here:
http://njcc.com/~hjohnson/m_scsi.html#HD20

Jobf.

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Can I survive on 1Mb, or will stuff just not work?

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Jobf

Great link to info on the Hard Disk 20!
(they want $49 for one! BwaHahahahahaha!)

So I dug mine up, and I've offered to GIVE IT to jl-plus for the cost of shipping, but I'm trying to test it first (I don't want him to be stuck with my junk if it doesn't work), so I hooked it up to an SE/30 to test it. It definitely powers up and sounds good, but the SE/30 doesn't see it. Couldn't see it from Apple HD SC Setup, or FWB Hard Disk Toolkit. It occurs to me that it isn't a SCSI drive, so. . .

Anyone recall what software one uses to format and set up one of those pieces of history????

They make a program (free demo) that turns a PC into a PPP server for Palm or Windows CE systems. So you "dial in" to your PC and it shares your network connection. You could probably get your mac to do it with a null modem cable, then PPP into your PC.

The Quick & Dirty Network for Macs & PCs
http://www.kan.org/networking/quicknet.html

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