ok, well i got the mac ii on the ‘net! spent a long time last night looking around for mactcp to no avail - was up ’til 3am! finally found it this afternoon on apple’s ftp site - not in the software section, but in the developers section! arg!

i had to jump a few hoops to get the networking up and running. to test last night (without tcp/ip, just ethernet) i installed netatalk on a linux box, but the server wouldn’t show up.

turns out the information i got on the etherport ii nic was wrong. there’s a single dip switch that is suppose to select between the aui port and the coax port. it’s labled cnet/enet - i didn’t know what cnet stood for, but the nic auto detects aui or coax as long as the switch is set to enet, which i found out today. i shoulda just flipped the switch last night! (wonder what the other setting is for!)

at work we’ve got mostly 10/100baseT, some gigabit fiber and one legacy 10base2 coax connection - which is in the data center, not by my test area. i’ve got a 10/100 switch in my area, so a dug out a old aui to 10baseT adapter - but it didn’t fit on the back of the mac! luckly we had a aui cable from the old days that i used to connect the adapter to the mac. at home my hub (yeah, it’s old, just 10baseT) has a aui and coax bnc connector, so i just used some old coax.

another problem was that the pram (bios) battery is dead and the mac must use this to store some data such as color settings and localtalk/ethertalk. so sometimes, if i had unplugged the mac, it would revert to localtalk and i’d forget to change it back to ethernet. ug.

so now i could see the appletalk network. that was cool. and once i found mactcp, i was on the ‘net! pinged a few things to make sure, then fired up telnet. sweet! a connection was made.

then i installed mosaic 1.3 - surfin’ in style! ok, most pages don’t come up anymore, but still cool.

tonight i installed machttp webserver from old disks i had. it was slow, but it did serve pages.

i’m installing system 7.5 right now to see if that’s faster or slower. supposedly 7.5.3 is free now, ’cause it’s legacy and unsupported, but i couldn’t find it at ftp.apple.com - thanks to the ‘net i found it though!
it was tricky getting stuff on the mac without a network - just those wonderful 3 1/2 inch floppies! i’d download stuff on windows then use a program called transmac to write a mac disk from windows - tres cool! (system 7.1 doesn’t have built in pc floppy access like system 7.5.)

in the process of looking for reusable floppies, i came across the disks i used to first install linux! ah… old slackware…

you may ask why on earth would i spend the time to do this? well, ’cause it’s cool.

funny note: during the system 7.5 install, one step it tells you it’s doing is “making your macintosh happy”. i’m kinda liking macs now!