Networking Your System 6 Mac

At this point in our series of posts about System 6, we have explored why you might be interested in System 6, what sorts of Macintosh units you might want to purchase to support that interest, and what minimum “starter kit” of software you might need to get you started in this new environment. Now it is time to load your System 6 machine up with the software you really need to make productive use out of the system.

There are two “usual” ways of doing this, networking the new machine with other Macs you may have, so that you can simply load new software across the network, and attaching mass storage devices such as an Iomega Zip drive or a CD-ROM and transferring the software in that way. This post explores the first of these two topics, networking your System 6 Macintosh. The last and final post in this series on System 6 will explore second option, adding mass storage.

The word “networking” deserves a little exploration of its own, in order to set the context for this post. There are two major forms of networking that could we could pursue: Apple’s own AppleTalk and the ubiquitous (today) Internet.

AppleTalk is an Apple proprietary set of protocols that allows two or more Macintoshes, along with other compatible devices, to communicate with each other. AppleTalk can run over either a simple serial connection between two or more units (LocalTalk) or it can run over Ethernet (EtherTalk), and thus address any compatible machines on your local home network.

In addition to AppleTalk, most people will want to get their new System 6 machine onto the Internet and the Web, and so this is an objective as well. We take this later objective with a grain of salt however, remembering that while a System 6 machine can make excellent use of many Internet resources, there is very little, if anything, that a System 6 machine can do on the web.

A practical consequence however of wanting both AppleTalk and Internet connectivity is that we will focus on AppleTalk over Ethernet… EtherTalk. Thus, this is the context in which we pursue “networking” in this post.

For the most part, we will need to start from scratch. Out of the box, your new System 6 installation will typically not come with AppleTalk, any form of TCP/IP stack (needed for the Internet) or even any form of Ethernet drivers.

To achieve our objective to AppleTalk over Ethernet, and the ability to access the Internet/web, we need to install both networking hardware and networking software.

Let’s start with the hardware. In order to accomplish networking, your machine needs to have network interface hardware at its disposal. Your machine may come with networking hardware built in, or you may need to install a NuBus network interface card (NIC) of your choice. Apple provided a range of Nubus NIC cards at the time, and similar cards were available from other vendors as well. I recommend the Apple NIC cards of the period to start with, simply because the drivers are largely available as part of the NSI 1.4.5 package.

This is what I did with my Macintosh IIsi. I purchased (on eBay) a Mac IIsi-specific PDS-to-Nubus extender, and an Apple NuBus NIC card. I physically installed this hardware before I began my networking software upgrade, and as a result the drivers for the new NIC went in as a seamless part of the NSI software install.

That’s the hardware – onto the software. You will need to install the following software, in order:

1/ Apple Network Software 1.4.5 (AppleTalk – will run over LocalTalk to start with)

2/ Ethernet drivers for the NIC hardware that is either built into, or you have installed on, your System 6 machine. As mentioned above, remember that drivers for many Apple NIC Cards are included in NSI 1.4.5.

3/ MacTCP 2.0.6, providing you with a System 6 compatible TCP/IP (Internet) stack.

As you approach your networking software installation, your new System 6 machine provides no networking support at all. Both the Network and the TCP/IP control panels are not present, and the Chooser control panel in all likelihood contains only one or more printer selections, and no AppleTalk selection, looking rather like this:

Like many things Macintosh however, transforming this into what you want is almost painfully easy.

In my case, I used my Power Macintosh 7300 to burn a copy of NSI 1.4.5 (the last version of Network Software to support System 6) onto a floppy. I fed that floppy into my Mac IIsi and it mounted it cleanly on the desktop with no issues. I executed the installer and it ran to completion also with no issues. Following a restart, I had a full AppleTalk client installed AND a shiny new Network control panel, supporting the shifting of my AppleTalk connection between LocalTalk and EtherTalk.

So far, so good. If EtherTalk networking was the objective, we would be done at this point.

However, the objective is EtherTalk networking AND Internet connectivity, and so you need to proceed to the final step, which is installing MacTCP. In this case, you will want MacTCP 2.0.6, although an earlier version may work. When I expanded the .sit file for MacTCP 2.0.6, I got just a file called MacTCP. Presuming that this was either an extension or a control panel, I copied it into the System folder and restarted. Success! I now had a MacTCP control panel, supporting both LocalTalk and EtherTalk selections.

A word of warning at this point. If you are used to more “modern” TCP settings such as you might find in later versions of Mac OS, you may be unpleasantly surprised by MacTCP’s presentation. The Internet was a fairly new thing in System 6’s time, and this is reflected in the sometimes arcane settings that MacTCP 2.0.6 presents to you. It may take some inspired tinkering, and perhaps just a little time, to get MacTCP to configure the things you will want to configure, but rest assured – it can be done.

Regrettably, this article is being written after the fact from notes that I made at the time (as I write this, the Happy Macs lab remains in storage as part of our present corporate move) and so I can’t include specific instructions for each MacTCP control. However, I recommend setting your IP address manually (I’ve never had much luck with modern DHCP servers, such as you will almost certainly have in your cable/DSL box, and early versions of Mac OS), setting your subnet mask to 255.255.255.0, and setting both your Gateway address and your Name Server address to the IP address of your local home router (which will typically be your home’s cable modem or DSL box). 192.168.0.1 was a common default address for many cable/DSL boxes for some time. Readers who have Comcast Xfinity boxes may find that 10.0.0.1 works for them.

Anyway, with a bit of tinkering, I successfully bludgeoned MacTCP into configuring the settings I wanted and restarted my Mac. When the boot was finished, I was pleased to see that the Chooser control panel now “saw” the other vintage Macs on the Happy Macs Lab network (specifically those that were turned on and which had AppleTalk networking enabled) indicating that AppleTalk over Ethernet was up and running on my System 6 Mac.

But better still, when I fired up MacTCP Ping, it not only successfully pinged the other Macs visible on the Happy Macs Lab network but ALSO successfully pinged multiple external web sites! My Mac IIsi was on the Internet!

I had to sit back and marvel at this point. An incredible amount of newly installed hardware and software (the NIC card, its’ drivers, MacTCP and MacTCP Ping) had all just working perfectly – and in perfect harmony – the “first time out of the box”, allowing my Mac IIsi to reach outside the limited confines of the Happy Macs Lab and out onto the wild, wild west of the Internet. As I said earlier, the whole thing had been almost painfully easy.

Reflecting on that, being able to ping other servers on the Internet was perhaps quite a technology tour de force, but in the end, it is not terribly useful. So, what did one do with an internet-networked System 6 Mac “back in the day”? Why, one Gophered of course! Gopher, a very capable text-based precursor of the web, was THE way to share information at the time, and has been discussed at length in several earlier posts of this blog. System 6, as you may well guess, had an excellent Gopher client in the form of the third party program TurboGopher 1.0.8b4 (an earlier version of the TurboGopher 2.x series which features prominently in the aforementioned blog posts on Gopher).

I installed TurboGopher 1.0.8b4, fired it up and pointed it at the current “daddy” of Gopherspace, Floodgap Systems’ gopher.floodgap.com server (port 70). TurboGopher got right through and displayed their home page perfectly, if somewhat more slowly than I was accustomed to… which is to be expected I suppose – the Mac IIsi is a 20 MHz 68030 machine, after all.

Assuming that you have been following along and installing hardware and software on your machine as you go, from this point on, the internet is an open resource to your System 6 Mac. Remember however that the web is not! I have experimented with some of the very early web browsers that would run under System 6, but have had no (none, zero, nada) usable results. You can network your Macs, you can Ping Internet servers, you can FTP files and you can cruise through Gopherspace… but you cannot surf the web with your networked System 6 Mac.

So there you have it then! Networking your System 6 Mac with Ethernet can be a simple and enabling experience. Best of luck to you in your efforts in this regard!

p.s.> Networking via LocalTalk, on the other hand, has eluded me completely thus far! Just before the Happy Macs Lab was packed up, I was working on networking two System 6 Macs exclusively over LocalTalk, with no MacTCP involved, and was getting absolutely nowhere! I DID manage to connect to an ImageWriter printer I have using just LocalTalk, but that was as far as I could get. I could not get the two Macs to “see” each other over LocalTalk. This may become the topic of additional posts at a future time, once I figure it all out! In the meantime, just a word to the wise. It does not appear to be as simple to LocalTalk two or more Macs as it is to EtherTalk them over MacTCP.

p.p.s> All of the software mentioned in this post is available in the System 6 section of the Happy Macs Gopher server, happymacs.ddns.net, port 70… or rather, will be very soon. Regrettably, as I write this (April 2018), the Happy Macs Gopher server is presently offline due to our corporate move. However, it should be back on the net no later than the end of May 2018. Watch this blog for notification of its renewed presence. Until then, most, if not all, of the above mentioned software can be found on the web with a bit of luck and a lot of inspired Google’ing.

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Happy Macs Lab, Gopher Server Are on the Move

The Happy Macs Lab and the Happy Macs Gopher site are on the move! I am moving to a new location for work and am now “between homes”. For the next few months, I am living in temporary housing while our new home is being completed, and that means that both the Happy Macs Lab and the Happy Macs Gopher server are both completely “off the air”.

This is a corporate move and so we did not have to pack anything, but I couldn’t bear the thought of ham-fisted movers disassembling and packing up my precious Macs (please no offense is intended if you happen to be a mover!) and so over the last month or so, I have been doing the job myself. Finally, this past weekend, it was time to load it all into a truck and drive it to our new location. As you can see below, I selected U-Haul for the job.

On each of the past several weekends, I have loaded up the car and taken down my most precious or most delicate Macs, a carload at a time. This past weekend, EVERYTHING else was loaded into the truck and taken down. You can see that the truck was fairly fully loaded. It is amazing how much Mac related paraphernalia I have when it is put all together in one place.

So, until our new home is move in ready (expected to be mid April), the Happy Macs Lab and Gopher Site are “off the air”. For those accessing the Gopher site on a regular basis, please accept my apologies, and my assurances that the site will be back on the air again as quickly as I am able to accomplish this.

You may be curious to know whether I set up any vintage Macs at my new temporary housing location. The quick answer is “yes”. Long time readers of this blog may remember that a few years ago, I made a similar move, although across a much larger distance, also for work. As with this time, the Happy Macs lab was also down for an extended duration, in that case 6 months. To retain some connection with the vintage Mac world, I brought two of my then favorite vintage Macs with me to my temporary housing location, my Power Macintosh 7300/200 and my Power Mac G5 Quad. This time around, ALL of my vintage Macs are essentially here with me in my temporary housing, but still in the boxes they were moved in and packed away neatly in an available attic. However, I have kept out a current favorite, my G3 All In One “Molar Mac”, and of course my “daily driver”, my 3.4 GHz iMac (definitely NOT a vintage Mac!). So, I am not completely out of the vintage Mac loop, just mostly.

I will keep everyone updated as things progress, and at any rate will soon be posting the two final articles in the System 6 series I was working on. These are “Networking Your System 6 Mac” and “Using External Mass Storage with Your System 6 Mac”, both of which were “in flight” when I had to tear down the lab. Stay tuned!

Happymacs Gopher Site Current and Planned Outages

A quick note to all the readers of this blog. The HappyMacs Gopher server appears to be down at present. Unfortunately I am traveling on business and will not be able to reset it until NEXT weekend. Regrettably therefore, the HappyMacs Gopher server is “off the air” until then.

Another personal note that will impact availability of the server from time to time. I have just started a new job, and we are relocating as a result. The PowerMac G5 Quad that hosts the HappyMacs Gopher site is of course coming with me (!) but on the day that it is moved, and perhaps for another day or two after, the server will be necessarily down. I will post here on the blog to let you know specifics as the details become clearer.

Our new home has a purpose built computer lab in the basement, giving the HappyMacs Lab it’s first purposely designed home. I am looking forward to getting into our new digs and getting everything set back up and running full tilt. I will publish pictures of the new lab once it is up and running.

Despite the move, I am nearly finished with my next post on networking System 6 Macs, and you can expect to see that published in the next week or two. That post will be followed by the last in the System 6 series, all about adding external mass storage to your System 6 Mac. Stay tuned!

Thanks for your patience with these temporary outages of the HappyMacs Gopher server and I will get it back on the air just as soon as I can.

Getting Software Onto A System 6 Mac

Your “new” System 6 Macintosh has finally arrived, and you have either loaded it with System 6 yourself, or more likely than not, it has arrived preloaded with it.

Now you are eager to start loading your own favorite software onto it, but right away you are faced with a serious disconnect.

The Problem:

Today’s world speaks CDs, DVDs and websites, but your System 6 Mac speaks floppies, and only floppies, at least when it first arrives …and not just any floppies …typically it will arrive equipped with the long forgotten dual-sided 800K floppy. Given the complete technical discontinuity between how you can deliver software to your new Mac and how it is able to receive it, you clearly have a problem. Getting software onto your new System 6 Mac may not be as easy as it might have seemed!

To compound this problem, a lot of the software that can be downloaded from the web for System 6 arrives as .dsk, .img or .image floppy disk image files. More often than not, these have to be “burned” to an actual floppy in order to be installed, and of course, on more occasions than not, these floppy images are going to be for 800K floppies.

Of course, you don’t have 800K floppies, nor the floppy drive to load them with. Your new Mac has an 800K floppy drive of course, but you have to load the disks you are going to feed into it. How will you do this? There are lots of interesting solutions to this problem, but a chicken and egg conundrum quickly emerges. Many of these solutions are enabled by some of the very software that you are trying to load onto your Mac, but to get that software onto your System 6 Mac, you need the solutions they implement already in place! …sort of a Catch-22!

Available Tools to Solve the Problem With:

So, what tools do you have available to bridge this technology chasm?

800K Floppy: The troublesome 800K floppy is one such tool. If you have access to another vintage Mac that supports this format, and is already loaded with some of the software you need, you have a viable avenue. Alternately, if you have access to a vintage Mac that has a dedicated external floppy port, you can surf over to eBay and purchase one of these drives, and a box of the 800K floppies to go with it. Both are readily available on eBay, and for a reasonable price. Then you can load software onto 800K floppies and walk them over to your new System 6 Mac – SneakerNet!

Networking: Networking is another tool. If you can network your new System 6 Mac to one or more other vintage Macs that you may have, you can transfer the software you want to load via AppleTalk. Of course this means that you need to load Apple’s Network Software Installer (NSI) v1.4.5 (the last version that was compatible with System 6) and then MacTCP onto your new System 6 Mac.

At this point, I am sure that I don’t need to say that the floppy drive on your new Mac is the only way to accomplish this, and so you need to purchase floppies with these components on them. NSI floppies show up periodically on eBay, again at a reasonable price, and so this is an option. Alternately, perhaps you have an NSI floppy lying around from days gone by. MacTCP is a bit more troublesome, since while it is readily available on the web, it does not show up by itself on eBay.

CiderPress: Another possible tool is to use a Windows XP PC (yes, a PC, not a Mac) to write the floppies you need. There is a WinXP program called CiderPress that will do this, but it will only work for 1.4MB floppies, since no WinXP PC will have the hardware to write the long obsolete 800K format. You CAN write 800K floppy images onto 1.4MB floppies using CiderPress, but I have not had much luck with the results. I am told that it works – it just hasn’t for me. Your mileage may vary!

Zip-100 Drive: By far the simplest tool is the once ubiquitous Zip-100 drive and disks. If you can support a Zip-100 drive on any other computer you have access to, Mac or PC, and you have an external SCSI Zip-100 drive that you can attach to the SCSI port on your new System 6 Mac (all of them will have such a port), you have a great means for transferring software in volume.

It is not quite that simple of course. You need to load the Iomega Zip Driver v4.2 (NOT to be confused with the IomegaWare package of the same or similar number – these two sets of software do not have harmonized version numbering!) onto your new System 6 Mac, and so once again you need to get that onto a floppy disk. Happily, this driver is very small and can be transferred easily this way, ONCE you have a way of writing HFS floppies. In this case, it can be 800K or the more available 1.4MB floppy – the driver is small enough that it doesn’t really matter.

There is one big catch here though if you are going to use a Mac to accomplish the transfer of files onto the Zip disk. As I reported in a very early post in this blog, Mac OS Standard is Not So Standard After All, you will need a Mac running Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard, or lower to load the Zip disks. Higher versions of Mac OS X will read Zip disks in HFS format, but they will not write them in this format. So, you are back to needing a classic Mac again, or a newer G4/G5 machine running a version of Mac OS X up to but not higher than 10.5.8 Leopard.

Linux! There is one more tool/approach I will mention, but I will not delve into it in any detail. You CAN use Linux to read and write HFS formatted floppies and Zip disks, and to do the equivalent of making DiskCopy sector-by-sector copies of the same.

However, I am guessing that the average reader of this blog will not also have an interest in Linux systems, nor have one or more of them just lying around and waiting to help in the accomplishment of the above. If you do however, and you want to try this route, you will need to install the HFS file system into your Linux distribution, and also become familiar with the incredibly flexible “dd” command. Linux can be challenging though – good luck!

Combining the Tools to Load Your System 6 Mac:

Setting Linux aside, lets look at how we can put the other tools together in various configurations in order to accomplish the desired result of getting software onto your new System 6 Macintosh.

Configuration 1: You have another vintage Mac whose floppy drive supports the 800K format. In this case, you can transfer software in painfully small 800K parcels until you get your new System 6 Mac up to where you want it. As mentioned above, this method is often referred to as SneakerNet, for the hopefully obvious reasons.

Configuration 2: You have the vintage Mac above, which supports 800K floppies, AND you have a one or more external Zip drives. In this case, you can use that 800K floppy just once, to transfer Iomega’s Zip Driver v4.2 onto your new System 6 Mac and then restart. From then on, you can transfer massive numbers of files (relative to the standard of the day) via 100MB Zip disks. This is SneakerNet on steroids!

Configuration 3: You have Configuration 2 AND you have a G4/G5 machine running Mac OS X Tiger or Leopard. In this case, you can use the above vintage Mac to get the Zip driver onto your System 6 Mac and then use Zip disks thereafter, loading them from the external Zip drive connected to your G4/G5.

This was my situation with my new Macintosh IIsi. I had a Quadra 840AV (running Mac OS 8.1) that supported both 1.4MB and 800K floppy formats. I used it to put the Iomega Zip driver onto an 800K floppy, used that floppy to load the driver onto the Macintosh IIsi, and then was able to switch to Zip disks for the rest of my software loading, with those Zip disks being loaded from my PowerMac G5.

Configuration 4: You have another vintage Mac that you can network your System 6 Mac to. Now you just have to install System 6’s networking software and then you can use AppleShare to transfer files from your other vintage Mac. To enable this approach, you need to find Apple’s Network Software Installer (NSI) v1.4.5 … on a floppy unfortunately… and install it on your System 6 Mac. You may also need to install MacTCP as well, if you are planning on using Ethernet networking. From there on, you can network to your other vintage Mac (using either LocalTalk or EtherTalk, as you wish) and you are off to the races.

Now of course, getting NSI onto a floppy can be easy, or it can be tough. It can be easy if you have managed to gain access to an existing NSI floppy, perhaps because you have one from days past, or maybe one came with your new System 6 Mac, or you were lucky enough to be able to buy one on eBay (I took this last course). It can be hard if none of the above apply and you have to find a non Macintosh way to burn an NSI .image file onto a floppy. In this case, the Windows XP CiderPress program I mentioned above can come to your aid, provided you have a Windows XP machine to run it on, and the time and the patience to figure out how to accomplish your intended task via CiderPress’ hopelessly non-intuitive user interface.

Configuration 5: Nothing, Nada, Zero: You have no other classic Macs to help you out (and thus you need to burn 800K floppies via CiderPress or like utilities) AND to really complicate matters, your new System 6 Macintosh supports ONLY 800K floppies. In this case, you are in a real pickle, since any Windows XP machines that you might run CiderPress on will only be able to support 1.4MB floppies. Your only option at this point may be to fall back to buying some premade floppies from web sites such as http://www.rescuemyclassicmac.com, which specialize in solving this very problem.

What About Using A CD-ROM?

Wait a minute, you may be thinking to yourself… what about using a CD-ROM to accomplish the loading of software onto the new System 6 machine?

Well, that is a good question, but the idea is fraught with just a few perils:

1/ The CD-ROM was not yet widely available during the reign of System 6, and so you will find very little (if any) System 6 software available via this media.

2/ You also will not find any System 6 capable machines that come with a built in CD-ROM drive. CD-ROMs simply were not part of the typical hardware lineup of the day. Happily, Apple (and others) did eventually produce external SCSI CD-ROMs that can be attached to your System 6 system, but this doesn’t really get you too far ahead – see the next peril.

3/ If you DO have an external SCSI CD-ROM that you can attach to your system, you still need to load the Apple CD-ROM support software onto the System 6 machine before it will read the CD-ROMs in question. Unfortunately, this puts you back to the problems and solutions above.

4/ Finally, to use a CD-ROM to do general-purpose software loading, you are going to have to load that software onto a CD-ROM, and thus will need to be familiar with burning CD-ROM ISO images. This is a whole separate topic that this post will not go into at this point.

As I said, just a few perils… and enough of them that I did not even consider this as a viable avenue.

Tools, Problems and Perils – Sheesh! What is the Best Approach?

SO… how do you best approach the problem of loading software onto your new System 6 Mac? Well, as I said in my last post on Getting Started With System 6, if you are new to the world of vintage Macs, I would not recommend System 6 as the best place to start. Start with a later version (I recommend Mac OS 8.1 specifically), and a matching classic Mac to run it on, and then backtrack to System 6 once you have that environment running cleanly. There are large numbers of such machines available even today on eBay, making this a very sensible and economical option.

Why a later Mac and Mac OS 8.1? The reasons are many, but the key ones are that later Macs will come with a built in CD-ROM drive and full software support for it, preloaded networking, and often, the Iomega support already included. Mac OS 8.1 is a particularly good choice because it straddles the gap between earlier versions of AppleTalk over EtherTalk and the later versions of AppleTalk over IP, making it a perfect bridge machine between the older and newer vintage Mac worlds.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that Mac OS 8.1 is also the final version of Mac OS that will run on 68K Macs, making it incredibly flexible irrespective of the machine you chose. It also doesn’t hurt that Mac OS 8.1 is fairly “modern” version of Mac OS, overcoming many of the “peculiarities” of its earlier predecessors.

Conclusion:

So, there you have it. As I said initially, getting software onto your new System 6 Mac can be really easy, or it can be really tough. I recommend attacking this problem from the vantage point of having an existing classic Mac with 800K floppy support already in place. This gives you the most direct set of approaches to accomplish the task at hand. Good luck!

This post composed on a PowerMac G5 running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

 

System 6 Software Links Added to Recommended Links Page

As promised in my last post, I have now updated the Recommended Links page with a set of known good links to pages from which you can download System 6 compatible software.

Some of these pages are devoted exclusively to System 6, but some are focused on Mac OS in general, thus System 6 and later releases. However, the collection represents the full set of sources I have used so far for the software I have running on my System 6 Macs.

If you are reading this post and are aware of other sources of System 6 software, please take a moment and comment on this post to that effect. I will update the links page as quickly thereafter as possible.

I have also had to remove a small number of now dead links from the Recommended Links page. Regrettably, some great sites have now disappeared, and they will be missed.

Check out the new links. There is still a vibrant community of users interested in System 6. Perhaps you will become one of them!

 

Getting Started with System 6

Let’s assume that you have decided to dive into System 6 head first, as I did just recently.

A whole new universe awaits you, and for those who are familiar with System 7 or later, it will take both some unlearning and some new learning to become proficient in this older, smaller but nonetheless very appealing environment. Despite the visual similarity to System 7 and later releases of Mac OS, the operational reality of System 6 is quite different. It is not bad… just different.

Preamble

Now a word of warning. If you have never dabbled in the world of vintage Macs before, I would not recommend System 6 as the place to start. The difference between System 6 and System 7 is enormous, and for beginners it is my guess that System 7 (or later) will serve your interests much more easily. The reasons for this will hopefully become apparent as you read through what follows, and are largely a function of System 6’s “time in the sun”, and what the computing world was like at that time.

What was System 6’s “time in the sun”? Well, System 6 debuted in 1988 and was Apple’s primary OS offer until it was replaced by System 7 in 1991. Its principal hardware running mate in the Apple product family of the day was Motorola’s 68030 processor, running at speeds up to the Mac IIfx’s “wicked fast” 40MHz. At the time, the combination of the Motorola 68030 and Macintosh System 6 was a slam-dunk against the competition.

A Brief Look Back – System 6 And Its Competition

Lets stop and consider that competition for a moment. In 1988, the competitive offer from the PC camp was a sad thing indeed. Intel 80386 processors running at 12 to 33 MHz were the racehorses of the PC world.

These horses were saddled with the twin disasters that were Windows 2.1 and Windows 3.0, resulting in an overall user experience that can only be likened to cold molasses running uphill.

Now if this seems like a bit of excessive hyperbole to you, you may be right, but it is hyperbole grounded in personal experience. I had the displeasure of working with 386 systems “back in the day” and I recall quite literally starting them booting and then stepping away to get a coffee, only to come back some time later and find that the CPU and the hard drive were still grinding away, having not yet completed the seemingly herculean task of booting DOS and Windows.

By comparison, a Macintosh IIsi (a contemporary Apple system of the day), equipped with a 20 MHz 68030 and running System 6, cold booted from power on to desktop in only 7 seconds… and the desktop that it booted to was an elegant, stable, well-thought out interface relative to the equivalent mess presented by Windows 3.0.

Admittedly, the 7-second number was for a minimal configuration, but to provide another data point, my Macintosh IIsi today, running a fully configured System 6 environment with all the applications, INITs and control panels I want, achieves the same result in only 60s, still leaps and bounds ahead of the competition from the Wintel camp.

What Do You Need – Hardware

Alright, enough Windows-bashing, however much fun it may be! Lets get started with the hardware. What do you need to get started with System 6? Well first of all, you need a Macintosh that can run System 6! There is a large set of such Macintoshes happily, but sadly they are becoming harder and harder to find on eBay for a reasonable price.

When I went looking for a System 6 capable Macintosh, I was immediately drawn to the Macintosh IIfx, the “wicked fast” king of the hill for 68030-based Macintoshes. The Macintosh IIfx sports a 40 MHz 68030, up to 128 MB of RAM, and a variety of hardware accelerators, including a pair of 10 MHz 6502 processors just for I/O (that’s 20x more 6502 than in an ENTIRE Apple II!). For the day, the machine was blisteringly fast. For today, it is blisteringly expensive! I saw one listed on eBay recently for the princely sum of $999. Clearly, a more economical option was needed!

Thankfully, per the above there is a sizeable set of other options available to choose from. The following is the list of Macintosh models that support System 6:

Macintosh 512Ke, Macintosh Plus, Macintosh SE, Macintosh SE FDHD, Macintosh Classic, Macintosh Classic II, Macintosh Performa 200, Macintosh Portable, Macintosh PowerBook 100, Macintosh II, Macintosh IIx, Macintosh IIcx, Macintosh IIci, Macintosh IIsi, Macintosh IIfx, Macintosh LC, and Macintosh LC II.

Excerpted from Wikipedia, the below table provides a more granular view of the same information:

Another word of warning! You might not want to just pick just any old one of the above. As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts on System 6, the 800K floppy dominated the System 6 world. In a largely floppy-based environment, you almost NEED to get a Macintosh that supports an additional external floppy drive, so that you can easily duplicate important disks. From the list above, the following subset supports an external floppy port:

512Ke, Plus, SE, SE FDHD, Classic, Classic II, Performa 200, Portable, PowerBook 100, IIcx, IIci, IIsi.

 You will almost certainly want to pick one of the above models.

In my case, I decided that in addition to the external floppy support, I wanted a larger screen than the original Macintosh format provided, and I also wanted color, not just the original Macintosh black and white. After trolling through eBay for a while, I settled on the Macintosh IIsi, which met all of these requirements. My earlier post “(Un)Happy Macs” relates the story of the acquisition and shakeout of my new Macintosh IIsi. And you, gentle reader? Determine what is important for you in your new “System 6 engine”, shop the above list on eBay and make your selection. Good luck!

What Do You Need – System Software

OK, that is the hardware. Now lets look at the software, starting with System 6 itself. If your new System 6 machine isn’t already loaded with System 6, get a copy of System 6.0.8 and install that. 6.0.8 was the final general-purpose release of System 6. There was one later release, 6.0.8L, but it in my testing of it, it would only boot on the machines it was targeted to, namely the Classic, Classic II, LC, LC II, and PowerBook 100.

Where can you get System 6.0.8? Well, you can purchase boot floppies for 6.0.8 on eBay, or alternately you can download them from The Macintosh Repository, at www.macintoshrepository.org. If you download them, you will need to “burn” them to floppies so that you can install them. Accomplishing this, and in fact the entire topic of getting software onto a new System 6 machine, will be explored in detail in a coming post in this series. Depending on the hardware and software you have access to, getting software onto these machines can be either “drop dead easy” or it can be very complex.

What Do You Need – Application Software

With the hardware and the system software in place, what about applications? This is where the fun really starts. As you consider applications, you need to begin by remembering that we are talking about System 6 here, not a later release. Think 1988. Old standbys that you may have depended on forever simply haven’t been written yet, and their later versions (once they did spring into being) simply don’t run under System 6.

JPEGView, for example, will not run under System 6! Mac OS without JPEGView? Perish the thought! BunchTyper (and in fact, pretty much EVERY type/creator utility I have ever used) requires System 7 and won’t run under System 6! Acrobat Reader, even as far back as version 2.1 requires System 7 or better. Photoshop 2.01 DOES run, but it will not read or write JPEG files (the JPEG standard has not yet been ratified in 1988!). For better or worse, System 7 was a real sea-change, and a LOT of the programs that I have relied on ever since I joined the vintage Macintosh world simply did not exist at the time of System 6 and thus will not run under it. Be ready to spend lots of time investigating alternatives.

There is lots of good news however. Microsoft Word 5.1a DOES run under System 6, and it is often regarded as the finest version of Word ever to grace a Mac. So does Microsoft Excel, at least up to Excel 4.0 (I haven’t tested any higher than that so far). PowerPoint 1.0 (yes, 1.0!) runs under System 6. This is PowerPoint BEFORE Microsoft purchased it. Per the above, the venerable Photoshop 2.0.1 runs under System 6 as well, and if you can coerce Photoshop 2.5.1 into installing successfully (it took me several days to accomplish this feat), it runs flawlessly AND is able to read and write JPEGs, albeit slowly.

Stuffit Expander works as well, but does not support the usual intuitive drag n’ drop operation (system wide drag ‘n drop was not introduced until System 7.5). Stuffit Deluxe 4.0 installs and runs, but do note that many of the System 6 compatible applications that you can download from the web have been stuffed with later versions of Stuffit and thus will not unstuff correctly on their target System 6 machines!

I know that all of this sounds somewhat challenging, but there are some great upsides to balance things out, programs that run under System 6 that just didn’t survive the transition to System 7 and slowly disappeared. For example, FullWrite Professional, a great word processor, and TattleTech, a wonderful system checking utility. How about the Zoomin’ extension, a great INIT for speeding up the drawing of windows, or OnCue, a wonderful little precursor to the cascading Apple menu that debuted in System 7? And then of course there are all those REALLY early versions of classics we all know and depend upon. How about Photoshop 0.63, or Excel 1.5, or even the above mentioned PowerPoint 1.0? It is fun, if perhaps not productive, to fire up these vintage classics and play with them. Any or all of these may run under System 7 or later, but I had never encountered any of them until I started digging into System 6.

… and then there are the games! Again, some or all of these may run under later versions of the Macintosh operating system, but most are so lightweight that they simply faded from view as CPU and graphics hardware got increasingly capable. There are various versions of Pong and Brick Out that I love playing to this day, including a wonderful little Desk Accessory called Knock Out. There are fun little shooting games like Artillery and of course the classic Stunt Copter game. Finally, how about another favorite of mine, Lunar Lander? Emaculation.com has a large set of these games available for download. Humorously, some of them are so old that they can’t run on an “advanced” OS like System 6, requiring earlier versions of the Macintosh system software to make them whole! How’s that for turning your perspective of System 6 on its head?

By today’s standards, these games are ridiculously simple, but if we set our technological arrogance aside for just a moment and simply enjoy them, they remain the true fun they were back in the late 80s. However, I digress…

SO… what DO you need as a minimum set of applications to get started with System 6? Here is my (highly subjective!) list of recommended first installs:

• OnCue – the only “launcher” I have ever found for System 6
• Desktop Manager – an Apple startup INIT that solves all sorts of desktop file related issues
• Super Clock – a great little control panel that puts a System 7 like clock in the menu bar
• DiskCopy 4.2 – an absolutely critical utility for dealing with floppy disk images
• DiskDup+ – another critical utility for dealing with floppy disk images
• MountImage – a critical DA for loading software from floppy disk images
• TeachText – an essential utility for reading all those help and readme files
• The Typist – the only type/creator changer I have ever found for System 6
• Iomega Zip Installer 4.2 – get an external SCSI Zip-100 and install this driver. You will need the Zip-100 to get all of the above titles onto your new Mac. You’re welcome!

A lot of these titles can be downloaded from Gamba’s System 6 page at:

http://home.earthlink.net/%7Egamba2/system6.html

There are many other sites that feature everything from a small set of System 6 favorites to truly comprehensive collections, and in my next post I will update the Recommended Links page of this blog with a full set of currently active links to System 6 software pages. I make a point of “currently active” because many of the System 6 “go to” pages that you will read about online, such as System 6 Heaven, are no longer active. Dead ends like that can quickly turn “System 6 Heaven” into “System 6 Hell”!

Also, coming soon, I will be adding my full collection of System 6 software to the Mac OS Classic software that is already available on the HappyMacs gopher site (gopher://happymacs.ddns.net). Per the above, I will restuff ALL of the listed titles with a System 6 compatible version of Stuffit, so that they can be unstuffed on a System 6 machine!

Summary

This is a good starting point. With one of the above Macintosh models, System 6.0.8 installed on it, and the above starter kit of applications, you are ready to begin exploring and enjoying System 6.

Coming Soon

In a coming installment of this series of posts on System 6, I will explore the options available for getting all of these titles (and presumably many more!) loaded onto your new System 6 Macintosh, an undertaking that is not as straightforward as it might seem.

Later posts will deal with networking your System 6 Mac and with connecting external mass media to it as well, including Zip-100 drives and CD-ROM drives.

Until then, happy (System 6) computing!

This post was composed on a Power Mac G5 under Mac OS Tiger

 

Six on Six – 6 Points of Interest for the Aspiring System 6 User

Are you interested in trying out System 6? Well if you are, there are a few things you need to know about it before you dive in. In this post, I present six points of interest related to System 6. In my next post, I will discuss how to get started with System 6.

Without further ado then, let’s dive it. Six points of interest regarding System 6:

1. System 6 is fast! Despite the prevalence of Motorola 68020 and 68030 processors driving the Macs that support it, the user experience of System 6 is one of speed. The System 6 software is well matched to the horsepower of the CPUs it ran on, resulting in a UI that feels slick and responsive. Here is an eye opening metric. My Macintosh IIsi, freshly loaded with System 6, went from cold power on to full desktop in only 7 seconds. THAT is fast! Weeks later, fully loaded down with all the software I wanted to install, that same task now takes 30s, but that is still exceptional, even by today’s standards.

2. Floppies are the way software is distributed. You will need to make your peace with this, and with either getting floppy originals or copies of the software you want to install, or making floppies up yourself from .dsk or .image files. This will require you to cozy up to some new utilities that you may not have encountered before, such as DiskDup+, ShrinkWrap and MountImage, not to mention the ever cantankerous DiskCopy 4.2 utility.

3. The 800K floppy dominates! The now archaic dual-sided 800K 3.5” floppy was the media of the day. CD-ROMs were not yet in wide distribution, and software was delivered on sets of 800K floppies. You will need a computer that supports 3.5” dual sided 800K floppies OR an external 3.5 floppy drive, plus a way to connect that drive to your Mac – your Mac needs to have the external port with the “i” symbol – see the image below.

4. You can get on the Internet, and even onto Gopherspace, but you cannot get onto the web in any meaningful way. Remember, System 6 was Apple’s OS offer from 1988 to 1991. NCSA Mosaic, the browser that popularized the web, didn’t make its public appearance until 1993, and September 1993 for the Mac OS version. The web and System 6 simply didn’t coexist in time, and this is reflected in the lack of web support for System 6.

On the other hand, Internet support is abundant: email, FTP, Ping and Gopher are just a few of the internet applications that are readily available for System 6.

5. There are no aliases, and almost no program launchers (that I have found), and thus few convenient ways to launch an application except by double clicking a file it has created. If this does not meet your need, you are reduced to navigating to the application itself on your hard drive and double clicking it. The OnCue system extension is the sole exception that I am aware of to this rule, and therefore despite its limitations it is thus enormously useful.

6. The Apple menu in the upper left corner is the home to Desk Accessories, not to a cascading Apple Menu folder hierarchy a la System 7 and later. Desk Accessories are the widgets of their day, small, single purpose applets that do a unique and useful thing. Chooser, for example, is a DA in System 6. If you are thinking that you could probably configure something like a hierarchical menu yourself, think again. The Apple Menu was largely configured with aliases, and per point 5 above, these have not yet been created at the time of System 6.

Well, I know I said “six points”, and the above was indeed six points, so this post should be just about done, but there is one more thing you just have to know before you commit to System 6, and so here it is – one last bonus point:

6+. 8M of RAM is it! The maximum that System 6 can address is 8 MB of RAM, and System 6 itself takes up some of that (happily, not very much – System 6 is remarkably space efficient). This many seem seriously limiting in today’s world, but back in the late 1980s, 8 MB of RAM was a LOT of RAM! There is a utility called Maxima that claims to allow System 6 to use up to 14MB of RAM for applications, but in my testing of it, for the most part all it did was take the extra memory and use it for a RAM disk. While this is undoubtedly useful, it is not 14 MB of application memory.

Did I say “one last bonus point”? Darn. There is STILL one more… this is it though folks, I promise.

6++. Like working with images? JPEG doesn’t exist yet! Remember, the JPEG standard wasn’t ratified until 1992. Like System 6 and the web, System 6 and JPEG simply did not overlap in time. The closest thing to a universal image format of the day was TIFF, along with the nearly Mac-standard PICT format.

Of course, none of this is of much concern to users in the late 80s since the CPUs of the day were not really powerful enough to decode and display JPEGs in any reasonable amount of time anyway. The 20 MHz 68030 on my Macintosh IIsi, even with a math coprocessor installed, still takes 30s to 60s for most small images, and much, much longer for larger images. This is not to say that JPEG support is totally absent in System 6. The last version of Photoshop to run on System 6, Photoshop 2.5.1, does support JPEG via an after-the-fact plug-in, and I have found a few other image viewers that also support JPEG under System 6, but they are few and far between.

So there you have it, six points of interest (and a few extras besides!) about System 6 for the aspiring new user. If you are still interesting in diving into this nearly familiar and yet strangely different world (and I would recommend giving it a whirl!), read on! My next post will cover the basic hardware and software that you will need to get up and running with System 6.