rob.rho.org.uk

I’ve not had much time to tinker since the start of the month, but in the time I have had I’ve had some partial success: the Mac SE is now talking to the Internet!

This turned out to be pretty straightforward, mainly following along with the instructions from BlueSCSI. The one wrinkle I hit was that I couldn’t mount the image with the drivers with the software I had. I worked around this by duping it to an actual, honest-to-goodness 3.5” floppy disk. Running from that, everything went smoothly, and pretty soon MacTCP was talking to my router, and from there the world.

So, why am I only calling this a partial success? While, strictly speaking, I’ve already achieved my stated aim, it doesn’t match the picture I had in my mind. When I said “on the Internet”, I was really meaning “browsing the web” — I want to be able to access this very blog from the SE. The networking layer is solved, but when I came to installing Netscape Navigator 2 (which seems like a reasonable baseline), I found that, rather than MacTCP, it requires OpenTransport (an alternative TCP/IP stack — yes, you needed to bring your own back in the day). BlueSCSI/DynaPORT also supports that, so I’m optimistic I’ll be able to sort it out.

Side note: while taking screenshots in System 7 is trivial (just Command-Shift-3), I’ve yet to figure out a smooth way of getting them off the SE in a form readable by modern software. My current workaround is to mount one of the SE’s hard drive images in InfiniteMac, open it there, and then take a screenshot of that. Hence, the above image isn’t of the highest fidelity. I still have the original PICT, and will replace it with a better version once I’ve fixed the workflow.