I've long been fascinated by the 68K Macs of the mid-80s. My mother used to tell stories of using one at work (where her coworkers would dismiss its WYSIWYG capabilities with a derisive "It lies!"). When I realized how close Commodore GEOS is to the Mac's user interface, I just had to have one.

In the summer of 2010, I acquired a Macintosh SE; the original owner had stuffed two floppy drives and a hard drive into it. One of the floppy drives seemed to have the dreaded "stiction", but when I got a Torx T15 with a long enough shaft, opened the case, and took it apart (no small feat with that much hardware inside), I found that the drives were just slightly misaligned in relation to the floppy slots on the front of the case. A bit of push 'n' pull while retightening some screws fixed that right up, and after getting to know the machine, I did a fresh install of System 7.1. Later, I acquired an SE/30 as well, which is what I've mostly been using. Its hard drive failed not too long after I got it, so replaced it with a SCSI2SD (holding it in place in the drive cage with a cat's-cradle made from string) and was able to install System 7.1 onto it as well.

chatting in IRC on a Mac SE

Both SEs have Asanté network cards, so naturally I wanted to set up a Linux box as a file server using netatalk (AppleTalk over TCP/IP). These are the steps I followed after I got my hands on a CD image containing a whole lot of classic Mac software:

• install hfsutils on the Linux box
• mount the ISO image:
  hmount /mnt/common/download/macintosh/Apple_Legacy_CD.iso
• copy from the ISO to the AppleTalk share:
  hcopy -b MacTCP.img /mnt/common/MacShare/
• unhex the copied file using a netatalk utility:
  unhex MacTCP.img.hqx
• repeat the process for Disk Copy 6.3.3
• copy Disk Copy and the MacTCP disk image to the SE
• mount the MacTCP image on the SE using Disk Copy
• copy the control panels into System Folder/Control Panels
• configure MacTCP

After a few false starts, I fired up a copy of ircle and connected to Freenode just to see what would happen... and lo and behold! I was on the 'net! Now anything is possible...

Like this! This is the venerable NCSA Mosaic browser (version 1.0.3), running on my Mac SE. He doesn't know what to do with PNG images, but hey. It took quite a bit of digging to find a browser that would run on this machine, since it only has a 68000 CPU. But here it is, in all its glory!	Or this! This is NCSA Telnet on the SE, connected to a Linux machine running telnetd (don't try this at home, kids). This Telnet client also has a built-in FTP server(!), and I was also able to FTP to the SE from the Linux box. Extraordinary.

Once the Mac was running TCP/IP, I learned to set up netatalk, and now the Linux share appears as an icon on the SE's desktop. This means that I can download software from the internet to the Linux box and copy it from there to the SE. The first problem is how to get the files into the proper Macintosh data fork/resource fork file format. For now, I've been using the tools like unhex and unbin that come with netatalk, but I'm having only about a 50% success rate. One of the most frustrating problems I've had so far is when I get a successful conversion and end up with a file in StuffIt format... that needs a newer version of StuffIt than I have on the SE.

back to home page