Tag: MacPlus

The floppy emulator I ordered a few days ago arrived yesterday afternoon, so I spent the latter half of the day puttering about with antique computers…

The emulator came as a box of parts, but was pretty easy to assemble overall and I had it up and running on the latest firmware in no time.

What this doohickey does is read drive images off of an SD card and presents that information in track/sector format to the computer. Basically a modern computer to 1980’s computer time machine.

The method I used to make said drive images was a bit convoluted and required two virtual machines and a handful of OSs…

The important piece was a bit of software called HFVExplorer; an old Windows app that can create and manage HFS file systems as images. This obviously needed to be run in Windows, and I happen to have an arm-based Win11 image in Parallels (a virtual machine system for Macs) for just such situations.

The second VM is Basilisk II, a 68k Mac emulation that will run on pretty much anything. This was used to decompress old archived disk images and application installers that used Aladdin’s “Stuffit” – a data compression tool used by Mac folks in the before times.

With this I was able to download images of the original MacOS 6.0 and MacOS 7.1 floppy sets, and create installable media.

Back over on the Mac Plus I discovered that it wouldn’t boot off of the 7.1 installer and insisted on the 6.0.8 installer. So after booting off of 6.0.8 I was able to format the 20meg HD and install 6.0.8…

Back in the old days this would have been an Olympic-level feat of floppy swapping as the OS came on 8 disks and the installer liked to bounce around a bit between disks, so it was about 12 swaps in total.

Once 6.0.8 was installed and the system rebooted it was time to do an in-place upgrade of 6.0.8. to 7.1. This is pretty easy; boot off the HD, mount the 7.1 installer image, and install…

The most worrisome part of the whole process is waiting the 5-7 minutes while the installer tells you it’s deleting old out of date stuff from the HD, without any real feedback such as a file list or even a progress bar. You can tell by the drive noises that something is going on though, so there’s that at least.

Eventually though 7.1 will start installing and you are rewarded with more floppy swapping – and about a half an hour and a reboot later…

So now I have a proper, clean install of 7.1 to base my future entertainment with this machine off of. Unlike the state the machine was in when I got it, this install includes all of the networking extensions and control panels… So my next effort will be getting an old Asante scsi-to-ethernet adapter working and getting the antique onto my local network here at the house.

Who knows, maybe I’ll even get the old 68K onto the Information Superhighway – and cruise really slow in the right-hand lane with my blinkers on. 😀

Listening to "Tell Me It's Over" by New Arcades

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

Today we set the wayback machine to 1987…

In early 1987 my duty station had changed from a TDU at the Groton Subbase to the USS Pennsylvania (SSBN 735), which was being built down the road at General Dynamics Electric Boat (E.B.). Over the previous Christmas I’d gone back home and returned with my Atari 800xl, and then sold my 800xl when I moved into the barracks at E.B. – so for the first time in a long time I was computerless.

Fortunately, one of the guys who arrived at the barracks a month later had an Apple Macintosh Plus, and he had set it up on the counter in the rec-room as that was the only place to really put it. And after some discussion I got his blessing to mess with the thing, so it became the system I used for about a year.

That was my first real exposure to the Macintosh platform, as well as access to a 68000 CPU that wasn’t being used for science stuff where my father worked – and it always stuck with me, even as I got into the Amiga platform in 1988…

Today I gathered up a bunch of old Apple computers and peripherals at work and ran them over to Apple Rescue of Denver – a recycler / restorer of old Apple stuff – to offload them on someone who could use / part them out. And while I was there spotted this old Mac Plus looking for a new home…

And I decided to give it one.

This particular Mac Plus came with a keyboard, mouse, Mac Saver fan, and a Macintosh HD20 external drive. And this unit has been upgraded to 4megs of ram from the original 1meg and the 9 inch diagonal screen and its whopping 512×342 resolution looks great and has no issues.

The above unit would have run about $5000 in 1987 dollars ($2600 for the computer, keyboard, and mouse, $800 for the 3megs of ram, and $1500 for the HD) – this would be $13,000 in today’s monopoly money.

Something to think about when pondering $4000 for the latest Apple Silicon powered laptop…

Overall the Mac and its peripherals are in amazing shape, and the ‘clunk’ of the keyboard as I was using it immediately sent me back in time.

Now to bodge a method to get software from the Internet onto the 37 year old computer. 🙂

A few hours later…

Fortunately I have a floppy drive for my G3 laptop, which will format / write 800k disks, so I have some basic ability to install things. But, that said, I have a Floppy Emu (model C) on the way – which adds the ability to use 21st century technology with 80’s computers.

Listening to "Magic Power" by Triumph