tibbetts's Journal: The Great Migration

Now that The Beast has entered our house, it's going to become The One Computer. That's right--everything else (except The Maclet, my beloved Mac Plus) has to go. So that means that the 7600, the iMac, and the HP Pavilion are going to be made redundant. The 7600 is spoken for, the iMac may go into storage (at least until I accept the fact that collecting Mac memorabilia is a waste of time, space, and money), and the Pavilion's probably going to put up for sale somewhere. (Anyone interested?) That means that everything worth keeping has to be moved to the 100Gbs of disk space on the new tower.

Net Work

All of these machines (except the Plus) have Ethernet, so the physical part of the network is covered. However, it's not so easy. OS X doesn't seem to play well with AppleTalk networks, in that it doesn't always recognize other machines. About 50% of the time, I have to manually enter the server's afp:// URL. Another wrinkle is the fact that I'm not going to have a floppy or Zip drive anymore, so I had to copy over all of the disks that I plan to keep (for classics like old System Software and HyperCard, games, and so forth). Tedious.

Connecting the PC to the tower will prove to be another kind of challenge. I haven't fully digested the OS X documentation, but I do remember seeing something along the lines that X can be integrated into a Windoze network out-of-the-box. If that turns out to be false, or if I'm too stupid to figure out how to set it up, then samba is always an option.

Ne Plus Ultra

And that leaves the Plus. How do I connect it to the network? Luckily, I saved the Farallon iPrint LocalTalk-to-Ethernet adapter that I'd used to connect a StyleWriter 1200 to the iMac before I got OS X and there weren't any StyleWriter drivers for it. But the iPrint won't work out of the box. I think that I need to get something like Apple's old (and unsupported) LocalTalk Bridge software, but that requires System 7.1. Maybe I can find a used SCSI-to-Ethernet adapter that will work under 6.0.8. If you know of a better way, let me know.