I have been contacted by the lady at the Ronald McDonald House to
do our first good deed (public service).  She asked me to do two 
things -- install Word 5.0 on her PC and somehow install a 3.5"
floppy into her AT.  Now, the first I can handle.  The second one
I may need some help with.

She wants to install the floppy so she can swap files with a Mac Classic
they also have in the office.  I'm thinking, however, that it might
be easier for them to connect the two computers with an RS232 cable,
and XMODEM the files between computers.  

So, does anyone have an opinion on this?  Can anyone give me a cable
diagram or pinouts for the Mac Classic?  Can anyone give me a copy of
a shareware terminal program for the Mac?

Thanks.

42 responses total.

I think, not all macs can read ibm format disks. Some need additional
software to do it.  That's all I know about it.

Networking them via apple-talk would be a good idea I think.  Mac doesn't
have to many serial connections, and i wonder if she needs it for something
else.  She may not want to play plug-jockey.

If she has two floppy drives in the machine now, and just wants to replace 
one, and the Mac will do IBM, it's a small matter physically. 3.5" drives
are better anyway, in my opinion. If it's an AT, it can probably even do
a 1.44 meg drive, no problem. 
Would the connection cost much to get going? I'd say do that if A: it's 
cheaper, and B: it's simple. Unless it's very very simple, I'd go with the 
drive.

  I can help with the drive installation.

  I'm pretty sure that the Mac Classic has a "super drive" in it 
(Mac lingo for high-density 3.5" floppy..)  If this is the case,
it's a trivial matter to move files back and forth to the IBM
on floppies (since it should come with Apple File Exchange software.)
This is both (a) much, much faster than transferring via serial
connection, and (b) significantly cheaper (i.e., free) than equipping
a PC to understant Appletalk/Localtalk..

  Apple File Exchange is pretty idiot-proof.  Assuming that the 
Mac Classic does indeed have the newer Apple drive mechanism, this
should be a very simple operation.

The PC does not have a floppy drive, so one would need to be installed.
Do you know if that's all they need?  I mean does the PC need
some different cables or maybe even a different controller?

Make that "The PC does not currently have a 3.5" drive."

I can do the drive installation in to the PC too.  It should not
require a new card or cable if they want to add the 3.5" as a 
second drive or replace the second 5 1/4".  All floppy controllers
will handle at least 2 drives, though the cable may only have a 
connector for one drive.  I can also make up a new cable (or buy
one) if needed.  You may need to get hold of a 5 1/4 to 3.5" drive
adapter if the additional drive will go into a 5 1/4" bay.

Transfering files between the Mac and AT is no problem.  I do this
on a regular basis between my Plus and AT.  I made up a 6 conductor
cable between my Mac and AT and run Z-term on the Mac. and Telix on
the AT (Both shareware).  I set one up to receive files and the other
to send.  I like to use Z-modem because it'll do batch files and will
do auto-downloads as well as being fast.  No AppleTalk, etc. involved.
I don't have the cable pinouts at my finger tips, but can get them for
you if you decide to go this way.  My Plus does not have a SuperDrive
but the Clasic does.  It will read all pc disks with the Apple File
Exchange software that comes with all machines equiped with said drive.

  It depends on the type of controller they currently have in the
machine.  They might or might not need an additional controller card.

  I'm not the best person to do this, as my experience is mostly with
non-DOS machines, but I can certainly take a PC apart and stick in a
floppy.  Having documentation describing their floppy controller would
help, though.  Chances are with a 286 clone they've got the floppy
controller built onto the motherboard. 

I went and took a look at the machine today.  It's a true-blue IBM AT.
From the comments here, it sounds like they can simply buy a 3.5"
drive and stick it in.  They have a deal with MicroAge whereby they
can buy stuff at cost.  I'll call MicroAge and see what their price
is.

  I would recommend that they get a high density (1.44MB) floppy
instead of just a double density (720KB) one if the price difference
isn't too severe (and it shouldn't be for just a 1/2ht. 3.5" drive
mechanism..)

If the machine is a true blue IBM, the whole game has changed.
You will need a special controller with special drivers (read
expensive) from a third party source to get a 3.5" High or Low
density drive to work on an IBM AT. Thanks IBM.

  How "special" and how expensive are the necessary controller & drivers?
In any case, this sounds like a stumbling block..

That's what I thought I had heard somewhere before, but after some
of the responses here I was getting hopeful.  :(

Maybe it's time to retrench to the serial link idea.

Network them forever!

We used to sell Procomm brand drives to people who needed this sort
of soloution, I think it ended up costing about $170.00. That's for
a controller (separate card from regular floppy controller), an external
drive, and the software to drive it. These things are a huge pain. The
City of Alma has spent at least $1000.00 in service time at $45.00/hr
having us "fix" their 3.5" drives after they screw it up somehow. I never
did figure out how they were doing this, but just reinstalling the 
software wasnt always the soloution. Their refusal to upgrade from 
IBM-DOS 4.0 to 4.1 may have been part of the problem.

Ouch!  

Sounds like someone in Alma was trying to do something particularly 
boneheaded, though.  All the same, do you have any experience with 
other vendors' products?

If I remember right, hmm -- an IBM AT doesn't have an FDC in the
motherboard, -- that's on the floppy/hard disk controller.
Hardware-wise, though, it'll talk to the 720K 3.5" drives, at least,
without any trouble at all.  The only real problem is software -- the
IBM AT bios never heard of 720K 3.5" floppy drives.  You might be able
to get around that, though, by switching from the standard IBM bios to
one of the 3rd party ones, perhaps phoenix.  'Course, there may be
something I'm missing -- I can't claim to be real fond of the
monsters...

  They're not my particular forte (whatever the hell that happens to be)
either..

Will an IBM AT talk to a 720K 5 1/4 drive?

It seems to me we looed into the BIOS upgrage route and being IBM, there 
was something funny that stopped up from doing that. As far as speaking
to a 720K 5.25, I don't know.

I know of no hardware reason why an AT couldn't talk to a 720K 5.25"
drive.  Software-wise, that's another problem.  It may take a bit
of work to brainwash the BIOS into pretending that, even though
it looks just like a 360K drive, it really has twice as many
tracks, and that to read 360K floppies, in fact, it needs to
double step.

The 1.2M 5.25" drive, incidently, is quite capable of reading & writing
720K floppies.  Dos isn't, but we all know Dos has problems.  On the
other hand, most versions of Unix for the PC know and understand 720K
quite well.  It's actually something of a standard -- the AT&T 3B2,
and Codata machines also understood the same format, and also,
with some minor effort, the Convergent Technologies miniframes, &etc.

So does Atari ST :-)

  Yes, though an ST uses 3.5" disks:  even though it understands the
format you're going to have a heck of a time reading them...

:)  for the optional second drive, you can always hook up a 5.25 drive
instead of 3.5

If you want to do HD (high density), that needs a little bit hacking on the
machine, no major project, however Atari Corp. sucks.

It is interesting to read that IBM clones are better for you to buy than
original IBM machines.  I wish there were Atari clones.

Well, to be fair to IBM, the original IBM AT came out before the clone.
It's kind of hard to be better than the clone when you don't know
what the clone is going to be like.  Also, there weren't very many
3.5" drives out at that point -- it wasn't at all clear if the
3.5" drives or the 3.25" drives were going to win back then.

I have an old XT with 2 720K, 3.5" drives.  The card for the drives is
intended to be used only with 360K or smaller drives.  This card will
read all 720 but only write 360K.  Now on booting the system I call a
driver file (driver.sys?) from my config.sys.  Once done, the system
reconizes 4 drives, A:, B:, C:, D: and E:.  A: and B: will write only
360K, but D: and E: will write (and read) 720K.  Of course there are 
only 2 physical drives on this system.  (It's been a while since I did
this, so it's probably not 100% correct.)
Now, couldn't one do something with driver.sys to patch around BIOS so
that this IBM will read and write 720K/1.44M 3.5" drives?
What happened to the serial connection idea?  It's simple and cheap.

and it is available without plugging in floppy disks.  While having a serial
link, you could make it an appletalk interface, I heard of software being
out there for the PC for doing so.

You don't need AppleTalk tho....

Right, but they want to transfer files between an apple and PC, and might find
it usefull to access disk storage and printers/modems thru 'some network'.
I thought Aplletalk is a serial network, and it seemed to be appropiate.
Is there any better network for this purpose?

  Depending on how often they need to share files, serial transfers could
be a pain..  They are cheap (~$5-10 for asst. cable parts..) though..

It's a shame the mac classic doesn't support a real network standard,
like ethernet.

  I'd argue that Appletalk (or Localtalk, or whatever the hell the protocol
is called these days) is every bit as much a "real networking standard" as
Ethernet.  Both are simply CSMA/CD protocols for sending packets out over a
wire, after all.  The fact that ethernets are better able to handle high
traffic is significant but Appletalk networks are well suited for home and
office use (and they're a real breeze for the complete novice to set up,
unlike an ethernet..) 

  The big advantage that ethernet has is its popularity in the Unix and PC
world.  It'd be nice if Apple had gone with the flow instead of offering 
their own network as standard, but in terms of cost and ease of use, I can't
argue with Appletalk's appeal.

The Macintosh has 2 serial ports.  One for the printer and the other 
for a modem, or whatever.  I have a switch box on the modem port and
can select either modem or PC.  I run MacPrint which allows me to 
talk to our HP Laser Jet through a Bay Tech data exchange system, which
is also used by several other PC's in the department.  Not as slick as
eathernet, but it's cheap and works well.
Who sells AppleTalk cards/boxes for the PC and what do they go for?

Appletalk is something that can run on top of either localtalk, or
ethernet (in which case, they apparently like to call it ethertalk.) You
can also run appletalk across token rings and anything else;
fortunately, appletalk doesn't depending on CSMA/CD.  The speed of
localtalk is a disappointment - it's limited to essentially floppy
speeds.  That was fine when everybody was using the floppies on their
mac's, but now that everybody's used to hard disks...

A further problem is indeed that localtalk is pretty specific to mac's
-- thinnet is now cheap and ubiquitous that practically everything else,
suns, vaxen, pc's, etc., all talk it, & in many cases, it comes
standard.  Now, you can also get things like 'kinetics fastpath's to
convert from localtalk to ethertalk, but here's where the easy
idiot-proof configuration fails -- it's actually rather easy to
configure a bad network once you toss in a few routers & variable
capacity networks.  (Nevertheless, the kinetics fastpath & ethernet on
the PC's might well be better than teaching the PC's how to talk
localtalk.)

Speaking of bad - here's just one sample problem with appletalk -- find
a good "traceroute" for it.  Tcp/ip has some undeniable advantages over
appletalk here.

I think you can also run tcp/ip over localtalk - certainly, there's
nothing in either protocol to preclude this possibility.  Or, if you
want to be really sick, you can wrap ddp packets inside of udp, which is
in fact exactly what one of the of options of the kinetics fastpath --
they call it "iptalk".  And then there's phase 1 ethertalk vs. phase 2
-- um, maybe I better stop, before I start complaining too much...

  Yes, maybe you'd better.  I admit that if I were setting up a computer
cluster, I'd rather have the Macs talking IP over thinnet, but Appletalk
& Localtalk are still well suited for the majority of Mac users.

  Problems with Fastpaths are hardly Apple's fault.  Kinetics boxes suck
and they have for as long as I can remember..

(Not that it has much to do with this item, but I think I've seen
eathernet boxes that plug into a Mac's SCSI port. )

   So how is the Ronald McDonald house doing?  ANy further info?

Nope. I guess they are either doing OK, or decided they didn't
need me.  I haven't heard from them since.

   Hmmm.  Might not hurt to give 'em a call, if you've got
the time.  If they're really befuddled they might he hesitent
to call.

(I've only joined this conference, so I'll only briefly recount what I
did w.r.t. higher density drives on a Zenith 151, and file transfer
between a Mac SE and the Zenith.)
  
I installed a 3.5 in 1.44 MB floppy drive in the Zenith, to replace a
360K drive. I use an auxillary controller called Omnibridge. I could
not get the 1.44 MB floppy to act as A:, so it became D:, and I assigned
A:=B:, as I couldn't make B: A: via hardware. Well, if anyone is
interested, I could look up the details!
  
After getting a DeskJet 500, I wanted to print to it from both the Zenith
and a Mac SE. The printer is some distance from the Mac, so I ran phone
wire. Since the Mac is serial and Zenith is parallel, I chose parallel
and used a serial to parallel converter for the Mac, and an auto A/B switch
to just the parallel port of the printer (they warn against using both
the serial and parallel ports on the Deskjet simultaneously, because of
possible groundloops). The hookup from the Mac is a manul A/B switch to
choose between a local Imagewriter and the remote Deskjet. 
  
After getting that working, I though I'd try to link the computers for
file transfer. Since I had the wiring in for the printers, I used Versaterm
at the Mac with output to the *printer* port and, at the remote site, a
manual A/B switch to choose between the DeskJet or the COM1 port of the
Zenith. Another manual A/B switch on COM1 lets that port choose between
my "network", and the Zenith's own modem (COM2 is used for either a mouse
or an X10 controller interface, with another A/B manual switlch). At the
Zenith I use ProComm, and put it in Host Mode, and then do everything from
the Mac. I had a lot of trouble getting F)iles and S)hell to work in Host
Mode, which was caused by the fact that ProComm runs Xon/Xoff handshake
*except* for F)iles and S)hell, when it transfers control to a command.com
alias, which insists on DCD, DSR and CTS held high. The latter was
accomplished by wiring a jumper box at the Zenith.
  
Amazingly enough, it all works fine, printing on the DeskJet from the Mac
and file transfer, over the same wires (but not simultaneously!). The first
use I made was to use the 2400 baud modem on the Mac to download PC files
(because it is faster than the 1200 bps I have on the Zenith), and then
upload the files to the Zenith for unzipping. 
  
It was also fun doing it.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss