hi bedouin! firstly, i am glad to see you here. i really thought you had gone for good (my first clue was when you said you were leaving these forums for good), but welcome back anyway, you're not somebody i wanted to never hear from again! right, here we go!
I have this same Mac on my network, with 16mb of ram (the max it will take) and a 700mb HD.
cool! i will need to look into that at some point, but not in a hurry. i don't even know how to find out the size of its current hard drive! i know it has 4MB of RAM, but i don't think that was the standard for this one, so perhaps the previous owner upgraded some of the insides? its more likely they did it for him in the apple centre when he bought it actually.
You can download System 7.5.5 for free from Apple's web site in their section of obsoleted software; I used floppies. It helps to have another Mac in the process to format the discs as HFS and also uncompress them while maintaining resource forks and other classic irritations.
hmm. well, that is good news, i will be doing that, and i have 3 boxes (16 inch house moving type boxes!) of floppies, but i don't have access to another mac. i would be downloading on the real PC though, which currently has FC4 (useless at floppies) but by that time, it will have been replaced with something i can actually configure (as opposed to something i can only use). i think any decent system (slackware for example) will be able to handle hfs disks no bother, i know i used to use hfs zip drives with slack 8.0 anyway.
The essential peripheral for any compact Mac is a SCSI > Ethernet adapter from Asante. This adapter came in two forms: one self-powered from the SCSI port, and another that required an AC adapter, but also provided a chainable SCSI port on the back for attaching stuff like extra hard drives, a CD ROM, etc. without detaching the ethernet adapter.
excellent. i will be attempting to ebay one of those
Important note regarding the adapter in any form: autosensing 10/100 or 10/100/1000 hubs cannot identify the Asante adapter; the only workaround is to spend dollars on a switch where each port can be manually assigned or to just attach an old 10 BaseT hub.
ok, well i have a DI-604 router. now, please bear in mind i am someone who is not even sure of the difference between a hub, a switch and a router, so when it comes to complicated terms like autosensing, i am out of my depth. i *may* have the manual for the router but as i recall it is useless (totally dumbed down and 100% microcentric), but i maybe the www knows something about whether it is autosensing or not.
System 6 is nice on this Mac, but lacks built in TCP/IP if I remember correctly, so it requires digging and configuring things such as MacTCP -- not real fun. I opted to take the performance hit and go for 7.5.5, which isn't a big deal since I have the maximum amount of ram.
well, the previous owner obviously found 7.5.3 OK for his 4MB of RAM, however i wouldn't know what sort of apps he would have been using. i suspect netscape and eudora via PPP and word and that's about it. it's got freePPP installed anyway. using third party software to try to connect to the net is a big turn off for me since a few failed attempts at connecting freedos and windows 3.11 to the net.
...OS X 10.4 cannot speak Appleshare over Appletalk, only Appleshare over TCP;
what? that's useless! this is one thing apple does peeve me off about. for no reason, they change all their specs so that their technology is not compatible over a gap of more than a few years. i think there's no excuse for this most of the time, and they have a duty to the people who shell out money for this stuff. same deal with firewire/usb and many others. but i am digressing.
System 7.5.5 must use Appleshare over Appletalk; netatalk can do this, and can be configured on any Linux/BSD box.
that sounds good.
The SCSI ethernet adapter is slow; do not expect any blazingly fast speeds. Moving data feels slower than dial up sometimes. NetBSD (and maybe Debian 68k) should be installable over the serial port, as the guy who owned mine previous to me had done that.
which one's the serial port? is it the circular one to the right of the scsi one? that's something i am a little lost about.
However, I do not believe Linux or BSD support the Asante ethernet adapter, so your outside communication will be limited to the serial port. If that sounds enticing to you, go for it I guess.
actually, i would probably just use macOS exclusively then, i have fond memories of this model and its system from high school, then when i went to college they had windows 3.11 (obviously the high school had a better budget than the high school, their computers were all older Acorn BBCs or newer Apple Macintoshes (well, newer for the early nineties), there was only one windows machine in the whole school i think, or possibly too. oop! digressing again!
On the other hand, this machine will run up to Mac OS 8.1, and I think 8.1 (or 8) introduced built-in web sharing.
really? i saw somewhere, i think it was lowendmac, that 7.5 is the highest you can put on this machine. i suspect i really would need to ramp up the RAM if i wanted to install 8, yes?
I'm using MacHTTP (others are probably fine as well, but do not let you change the default port).
would you recommend this daring software upgrade, considering i am not about to upgrade the RAM, or would you say getting an asante object is the best plan?
Game wise, you'll want to check out Shufflepuck Cafe. All in all, it's probably not worth your time, and the money you'd waste on it you could get a G3 PowerMac (at least beige) and run something more modern -- like OS X. I only tinkered with mine out of boredom one weekend.
well, as soon as somebody leaves a G3 mac in a skip somewhere, i'm in! :-D games, i don't have time for anyway, so that's OK, unless they are like really old NES ones or something, and i suspect zophar's domain can fix me up for emulators there if i want them.
while we're at it, here's a picture of mine in its new home:
http://www.polytheism.org.uk/pix/macclassicii.jpg
