On 10/24/2016 2:47 PM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I would not call it "next to impossible" to provide these capabilities. I'd simply state that supporting these capabilities on System 7 Macs is limited compared to 21st century computing standards. Why? because in those days, support was very specific to brands and models of devices; and because networking was "siloed" to either Apple/Mac or IBM; and of course pre-Internet. System 8 was "better" but had many of the same problems, and is too big for some of the oldest Macs. and, some of these Macs came out before CD-ROMs, or Ethernet, were in common use.
[...] No disagreement from me and I especially appreciate the suggestion of the Zip Drive. Perhaps I should have said "Next to impossible with the current financial situation"! The IIcx is currently non-functioning (brand new power supply, so probably needs recapping... not something I'm even remotely qualified to think about doing). The SE is 800K only, the Apple IIc+ is 800K only. We do have a Floppy EMU for the SE (and really need to buy a second one for the IIc+... but we have CFFA3000s in the IIe and IIgs, so that's not so much of an issue). The biggest problem, however, is that finding disk images for that vintage mac stuff is a big pain. For example, I would love for the students to be able to play Dark Castle on the SE, but while I can find individual executables, finding a working disk image has been next to impossible. And the bank, i.e. me, has run a bit short at this point so the modern flash solutions will be slow coming. :) I do not know of a modern disk editor that supports Mac disk images (I'd love to know if I'm wrong - and we can handle literally any platform). The images on the Apple II series are so plentiful, that, ironically, we rarely have to use a disk editor like CiderPress. Best wishes, -Adam