Adam's Apple

Vintage Mac Workhorse: Mac Plus with System 6.0.8

Adam Rosen - 2011.02.09 - Tip Jar

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Short link: http://bit.ly/fTQokR

This is the first in a series of articles showing how Adam Rosen uses four vintage Macs to read, recover, convert, transfer, and return files to his clients.

The Vintage Mac Museum contains several dozen models of Macs, but most only get used occasionally. A few carefully chosen machines are all that are really needed to bridge the generations and provide access to the vast majority of Macintosh software and files. With the arrival of a few large file transfer jobs at Oakbog - one contained 111 floppy disks worth of archives - I thought I'd devote a few posts to the workhorse machines in the collection.

platinum Macintosh Plus The Mac Plus was Apple's longest-selling 680x0 Macintosh and is a very versatile machine when dealing with old Mac disks and software. It's 800K floppy drive can read and write both 400K and 800K disks, allowing the machine to boot up in the original Mac OS all the way though System 7 via floppy disk.

The Apple 800K drives made by Sony are tanks - much more reliable than 400K drives - and able to read many old disks that 1.44M SuperDrive floppy drives cannot. Apple ran these mechanisms with variable speeds to squeeze in more data, so you need an original Apple drive to read single-sided and double-sided Mac floppy disks.

Equally useful on the Plus is the external SCSI port, which is connected to a whopping 30 MB external hard drive (in an original Apple drive enclosure, of course). With System 6.0.8 installed and 4 MB (!) of RAM, things run pretty zippy (in a relative sense) for an old machine. Most programs written for pre-System 7 versions of the Mac OS will run on System 6, which is particularly handy for non-32-bit compatible software like the original MacWrite or early versions of Microsoft Word.

The Chooser
You can select a printer or file server using the Mac's Chooser.

System 6 is able to utilize AppleTalk to communicate with other Macs on the network. At the Vintage Mac Museum, a small LocalTalk network using PhoneNet connectors and telephone cabling (remember those?) runs between the Plus and a Quadra 840av running Mac OS 8.1 with File Sharing enabled. The Plus can access the Quadra via AppleShare in the Chooser, and via this link files from floppy disk can be relayed up the chain.

It's fun to work with the Plus, a 9" black & white Mac with that distinctive sounding keyboard. I have Talking Moose installed, which still makes me laugh, as well as old games like MacYahtzee and Tetris. Takes me back to my college days. A Kensington System Saver fan sits atop the handle, reminding us that it isn't only current Macs that tend to overheat due to lack of adequate ventilation.

The design shares the same monitor and power supply as the 128K and 512K Macs, so it isn't hard to find spare parts. The biggest challenge is nursing along the old hard drives with System 6 installed. Note: if you're putting your own system together, these disks require formatting with the Apple HD SC Setup Utility, not the newer Drive Setup application.

This article was originally published on Adam's Vintage Mac Museum Blog. It has been adapted and reprinted here with his permission.

Recent Adam's Apple Columns

Mac OS 9 Isn't Dead Yet, 2011.05.16. In some areas, the need to run Classic Mac software or the cost of upgrading apps to OS X keeps people using Mac OS 9.
Installing Mac OS 9 on the Mirrored Drive Doors Power Mac G4, 2011.03.21. The MDD was Apple's last Power Mac capable of booting into Mac OS 9, and you need to have just the right version of 9.2.2 for it to work.
Vintage Mac Workhorse: Power Mac G4 Cube with Mac OS X 10.4.11, 2011.03.03. The G4 Cube has plenty of power and runs OS X 10.4 Tiger very comfortably, letting it act as a server accessible by new Macs and old.
More in the Adam's Apple index.

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