The first thing one should do with any old computer hardware is work out how to get it to connect to the local BBS.
The Mac Plus needed some OS level help to get a modem working… The MacOS 7.1 install ‘works’, but it’s in pretty rough shape from the previous owner. It looks like someone was running out of room on the 20meg HDD for the various apps they were using, so they started pulling things out of the system folder.
Most of the ‘personal’ stuff was removed from the HDD, so there’s space now – but the OS is a bit messed up. I’ll reload it once the 80’s floppy to 20’s digital media adapter arrives.
Anyway, getting to the BBS involved copying extensions and control panels off of my 165c via 800k floppy, and then a lot of fiddling to get LocalTalk and AppleShare working. This let me connect the two machines together via serial to get Black Night (An old 68K BBS terminal app) onto the Mac Plus.
See, Black Night’s executable is bigger than an 800k floppy will hold, so 80’s networking was the only real solution. Way back in the mid-to-late 80’s, AppleTalk was the most used computer network standard on the planet – which is when I got involved with it – and it was a lot of fun to wring all of that 40 year old network knowledge out of my antique brain.
Once I got Black Night running and got the System 7 modem tool to work again, it was pretty easy to get my serial-to-wifi modem emulator to connect to EOTD via telnet. And once connected I checked my messages, replied to a couple of folks, and then logged off to return to the 21st century…
Good times.
Listening to "Fading Memory" by Morgan Willis