vcf-midatlantic] Mac OS 7.1 Terminal Emulator & BBS software
I don’t have any of my old Zip Drives save one internal one, nor my Jaz Drive. My Zip drives would have been useless anyway as all the ones I owned were parallel port, not SCSI.
I sell SCSI external ZIP 100 drives, and parallel external ones. USB ZIP drives were not uncommon on eBay, I don't have a stock of those. Internal SCSI ZIP drives are a little less common and my stock is limited. I have stacks of IDE/PATA ZIP drives. Also disks. Contact me privately about any of these. I'm replying publicly, because ZIP drive technology is actually a pretty good "vintage" resource. SOme people malign ZIP disks and drives. The facts are, PC's and Windows systems used them for quite a long time, you could buy ZIP disks at the office-supply stores well into the 2000's. I don't know of much removable storage, that spans Macs and PC's, and can be connected to most Macs and most Windows systems, *and* allow files to move between them. There's Mac-format and PC-format ZIP disks, but old Macs can read either and I think Windows can read either (I forget).
Oh, my mistake, [my SE/30 memory is] not 1.5 mb, it’s 8mb. But my hard drive sounds very gummy. Where it’ll slow down and stop spinning occasionally.
Well, time to replace that drive. While you are in there, get some 4MB or 16MB SIMMS and goose up that SE/30. (you need four SIMMS of a kind.) That's a very desirable compact Mac and it's good you have it in working order. System 7 likes more than several MB of RAM. The SE/30 mobos, they need recapping soon, if they haven't been already. Herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net
On Mar 5, 2018, at 9:14 PM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I'm replying publicly, because ZIP drive technology is actually a pretty good "vintage" resource. SOme people malign ZIP disks and drives. The facts are, PC's and Windows systems used them for quite a long time, you could buy ZIP disks at the office-supply stores well into the 2000's.
Zip 100s are generally pretty reliable; their infamous reliability problems really set in around the second generation, definitely by the time the 250MB version hit. Stick with the boxier 100MB drives and you should be set.
I don't know of much removable storage, that spans Macs and PC's, and can be connected to most Macs and most Windows systems, *and* allow files to move between them. There's Mac-format and PC-format ZIP disks, but old Macs can read either and I think Windows can read either (I forget).
The format is just the filesystem on the disk; Macs can read Windows filesystems, in general, but Windows doesn't come with drivers for HFS or its derivatives (I'm pretty sure there are ones you can install, but I haven't really looked into it). Unlike 400/800k vs. 360/720k floppies, the difference isn't in the low-level disk format; Mac and PC Zip disks are the same aside from the filesystem. This is useful, because Zip drives are standard SCSI drives, which means they're pretty decent hard drive replacements for a lot of vintage machines that can use SCSI. I used (and sometimes, still use) a Zip 100 as the hard drive for my PDP-11/23, since I have a SCSI card for it; a 100 MB hard drive is rather nicely large for RSX-11M, and you can even bootstrap it by building the system image in simh and just dd'ing the simh hard drive image to a Zip drive connected via SCSI, USB or ATAPI to a more modern machine. It's really great. - Dave
I don't know of much removable storage, that spans Macs and PC's, and can be connected to most Macs and most Windows systems, *and* allow files to move >between them. There's Mac-format and PC-format ZIP disks, but old Macs can read either and I think Windows can read either (I forget).
I have a vague recollection of products called bernoulli and syquest (sp?)? But I don't remember the details of them. I agree with Herb, Zip was quite ubiquitous.. Regards Eugene W2HX
On Mar 8, 2018, at 11:10, W2HX via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I have a vague recollection of products called bernoulli and syquest (sp?)? But I don't remember the details of them. I agree with Herb, Zip was quite ubiquitous..
Bernoulli and SyQuest were essentially the predecessor formats to Zip and Jaz, respectively (though SyQuest drives and media were WAY more reliable than Jaz drives and media, which were mainly a great way to accidentally lose your data). I LOVED the 44 and 88 MB 5.25" SyQuest drives when I was younger. Like Zip and Jaz drives, they're SCSI, so they work well on vintage machines that can use SCSI. Dave McGuire is a Bernoulli fan and could probably elaborate more on those. - Dave
Syquest drives were a boon before portable hard drives were a thing. Used them to quickly image PS/2 machines back when all it took was xcopy z: c: /e /v /q /h On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 11:18 AM David Riley via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On Mar 8, 2018, at 11:10, W2HX via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I have a vague recollection of products called bernoulli and syquest (sp?)? But I don't remember the details of them. I agree with Herb, Zip was quite ubiquitous..
Bernoulli and SyQuest were essentially the predecessor formats to Zip and Jaz, respectively (though SyQuest drives and media were WAY more reliable than Jaz drives and media, which were mainly a great way to accidentally lose your data). I LOVED the 44 and 88 MB 5.25" SyQuest drives when I was younger. Like Zip and Jaz drives, they're SCSI, so they work well on vintage machines that can use SCSI.
Dave McGuire is a Bernoulli fan and could probably elaborate more on those.
- Dave
I still have both 5.25 and 3.5" syquest drives, but I prefer the Zip drives. The syquest drives were great for their time but the zips were smaller and higher capacity. I have both internal and external jazz drives. I always had good luck with them but the horror stories about them were numerous and widespread! Tony
On Mar 8, 2018, at 11:36 AM, Tony Bogan via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I still have both 5.25 and 3.5" syquest drives, but I prefer the Zip drives. The syquest drives were great for their time but the zips were smaller and higher capacity.
Yes, but the Zip drive came along about 5-10 years later, so. :-) I have lots of fond childhood memories of running games off a SyQuest drive in my dad's lab in the late '80s and early '90s on a Mac IIci; the Zip drive didn't come around until about 1996 (I have an internal one on my Power Mac 7300 that I got in 1997).
I have both internal and external jazz drives. I always had good luck with them but the horror stories about them were numerous and widespread!
Jaz drives were great and fast, but I don't have a single drive or disk that seems to work now. I'm hoping it's just bad luck, but I haven't had the urge to potentially destroy more disks to test it out. - Dave
On Thu, Mar 08, 2018 at 11:36:41AM -0500, Tony Bogan via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I still have both 5.25 and 3.5" syquest drives, but I prefer the Zip drives. The syquest drives were great for their time but the zips were smaller and higher capacity.
Do you happen to have one of the ST-506 type MFM Syquest drives? If so I would like to borrow one to display as part of my disk VCF exhibit.
I have a couple. Not sure of the functional status of them, but I have them. Remind me before VCF and I can bring them along. -Ian On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 8:10 PM, David Gesswein via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 08, 2018 at 11:36:41AM -0500, Tony Bogan via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I still have both 5.25 and 3.5" syquest drives, but I prefer the Zip drives. The syquest drives were great for their time but the zips were smaller and higher capacity.
Do you happen to have one of the ST-506 type MFM Syquest drives? If so I would like to borrow one to display as part of my disk VCF exhibit.
On 03/08/2018 11:18 AM, David Riley via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
On Mar 8, 2018, at 11:10, W2HX via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I have a vague recollection of products called bernoulli and syquest (sp?)? But I don't remember the details of them. I agree with Herb, Zip was quite ubiquitous..
Bernoulli and SyQuest were essentially the predecessor formats to Zip and Jaz, respectively (though SyQuest drives and media were WAY more reliable than Jaz drives and media, which were mainly a great way to accidentally lose your data). I LOVED the 44 and 88 MB 5.25" SyQuest drives when I was younger. Like Zip and Jaz drives, they're SCSI, so they work well on vintage machines that can use SCSI.
Dave McGuire is a Bernoulli fan and could probably elaborate more on those.
I do love Bernoullis. I was a heavy user of them since day one, starting with the 10MB 8" dual full-height drive that was packaged in a case that matched the styling of the IBM PC. I then moved to 20MB 8", and shortly thereafter got a job in a US Gov't defense-related organization in which 44MB 5.25" Bernoulli subsystems were everywhere, usually on PCs running DOS. They were beloved in that world because cartridges could be controlled by security personnel and kept in a vault. These drives and their disks were (and still are) incredibly reliable, especially given the general nature of removable media. The 10MB and 20MB Bernoulli drives use a dumbed-down variant of SCSI, but it's not quite SASI as I understand it. They used drivers that you installed via config.sys, and they required their own controllers for ISA-bus use. There isn't much logic on those controllers. I recall there being a couple of variants but I don't remember the numbers anymore. There are half-height versions of the 20MB 8" Bernoullis, but I don't know if there are half-height versions of the 10MB ones. I have an early Kevex energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometer that's built around a PDP-11/03, with a Z8000 as a numeric coprocessor, that uses 20MB Bernoullis (half-height) emulating an RL subsystem. That system is in storage and I haven't looked at it in many years; I don't recall how the Bernoulli subsystem is interfaced to the Qbus in that system. Today I use 44MB and 90MB 5.25" Bernoulli drives on one of my "home PDP11s" (I have a few "personal" PDP-8s, PDP-11s, and VAXen which are at home rather than at the LSSM, for soul-healing purposes), on CMD SCSI host adapters, and they work great. Zip drives are essentially the same thing in a smaller form factor, but Iomega decided to start marketing them to nontechnical people (hence the new name, fancy colors, etc etc) because a lot of those people couldn't even pronounce "Bernoulli" let alone know who he was or why the original products bore his name. The 100MB Zip drives and disks are essentially indestructible. I've used hundreds of the disks and dozens of the drives, and I've seen precisely ONE of the disks fail, and two drives. One of the two drives was killed by a friend of mine who always insisted that all wall wart power adapters are actually the same, and all the numbers stamped on them were only there to sell more wall warts. The higher-capacity Zip disks have reliability problems. I won't go near them for my own use for that reason. And Jaz drives, for all of their attractiveness, are all but useless. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On Sun, 11 Mar 2018, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
The higher-capacity Zip disks have reliability problems. I won't go near them for my own use for that reason. And Jaz drives, for all of their attractiveness, are all but useless.
What sort of problems afflict the Jaz drives? I have several here, but haven't used any of them for quite a while. Mike Loewen mloewen@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/
On 03/11/2018 02:20 PM, Mike Loewen via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
The higher-capacity Zip disks have reliability problems. I won't go near them for my own use for that reason. And Jaz drives, for all of their attractiveness, are all but useless.
What sort of problems afflict the Jaz drives? I have several here, but haven't used any of them for quite a while.
They just plain crash, if memory serves. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On Mar 11, 2018, at 18:53, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On 03/11/2018 02:20 PM, Mike Loewen via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
The higher-capacity Zip disks have reliability problems. I won't go near them for my own use for that reason. And Jaz drives, for all of their attractiveness, are all but useless.
What sort of problems afflict the Jaz drives? I have several here, but haven't used any of them for quite a while.
They just plain crash, if memory serves.
Yeah, in my experience, they just stop working. I haven't been able to tell yet if it's the media or the drive that dies most often (small sample size), but at this point I mostly only use Jaz disks when I need to transport something from one machine to another or mount a scratch monkey. - Dave
Here’s a video I made a few years ago using a 20MB Bernoulli drive with my Tandy 6000 https://youtu.be/mM1IH8frd_U <https://youtu.be/mM1IH8frd_U>
On 03/11/2018 02:21 PM, Peter Cetinski wrote:
Here’s a video I made a few years ago using a 20MB Bernoulli drive with my Tandy 6000
Very nice! (and a beautiful system!) -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
IIRC, both windows and mac could read windows formatted Zip disks. Only Mac could read Mac formatted (though there is software for Windows that allows reading Mac disks). A reason I always wondered why anyone would use the Mac format. You cant believe how often we'd get media at work delivered on Mac formatted disks, and we PAID those people! If you pay someone, in my opinion, you should also dictate how the item is delivered. Back then the drivers to access Mac disks on Windows was always buggy and prone to crashing. So we had to buy a Mac just to be able to receive files from these people. Probably a good half of Mac sales back then were people having to buy them in order to access files from Mac users who had no idea how to save things to they could be more widely accessed. Yea Zip technology was great the click of death issues aside. They still to this day are great for retro systems with HD controllers in order to easily make backups of your system at the very least, and to transfer between systems as your collection inevitably grows. Bernouli and Syquest drives predated them but were never as widespread or good, media was also a lot larger and less portable. Zip made large portable storage affordable until burnable CDs became more widespread, reliable and cheaper. Though once CDs did, it marked the end for the dominance of the Zip drive. Another good drive and as maligned was the Cliq. 40MB in a small format that could fit into a PCMCIA slot in a laptop. great for making a quick backup of files while on the go to prevent data loss, or to get them to transfer them. On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 9:14 PM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I don’t have any of my old Zip Drives save one internal one, nor my Jaz Drive. My Zip drives would have been useless anyway as all the ones I owned were parallel port, not SCSI.
I sell SCSI external ZIP 100 drives, and parallel external ones. USB ZIP drives were not uncommon on eBay, I don't have a stock of those. Internal SCSI ZIP drives are a little less common and my stock is limited. I have stacks of IDE/PATA ZIP drives. Also disks. Contact me privately about any of these.
I'm replying publicly, because ZIP drive technology is actually a pretty good "vintage" resource. SOme people malign ZIP disks and drives. The facts are, PC's and Windows systems used them for quite a long time, you could buy ZIP disks at the office-supply stores well into the 2000's.
I don't know of much removable storage, that spans Macs and PC's, and can be connected to most Macs and most Windows systems, *and* allow files to move between them. There's Mac-format and PC-format ZIP disks, but old Macs can read either and I think Windows can read either (I forget).
Oh, my mistake, [my SE/30 memory is] not 1.5 mb, it’s 8mb. But my hard drive sounds very gummy. Where it’ll slow down and stop spinning occasionally.
Well, time to replace that drive. While you are in there, get some 4MB or 16MB SIMMS and goose up that SE/30. (you need four SIMMS of a kind.) That's a very desirable compact Mac and it's good you have it in working order. System 7 likes more than several MB of RAM. The SE/30 mobos, they need recapping soon, if they haven't been already.
Herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net
A reason I always wondered why anyone would use the Mac format. You cant believe how often we'd get media at work delivered on Mac formatted disks, and we PAID those people! If you pay someone, in my opinion, you should
Oh and on the crusty macs the whole file fork thing. You could copy an archive file or binary to a MAC via whatever means and it just showed up as an unusable blob without other utilities to change some thing about it so it could execute or so the archive programs could unarchive it. Never understood the appeal of the crusty Macs, but I've owned a bunch as a collector. And they were good for desktop publishing! - Ethan
A reason I always wondered why anyone would use the Mac format. You cant believe how often we'd get media at work delivered on Mac formatted disks, and we PAID those people! If you pay someone, in my opinion, you should
Oh and on the crusty macs the whole file fork thing. You could copy an archive file or binary to a MAC via whatever means and it just showed up as an unusable blob without other utilities to change some thing about it so it could execute or so the archive programs could unarchive it.
Never understood the appeal of the crusty Macs, but I've owned a bunch as a collector. And they were good for desktop publishing!
- Ethan
It's actually funny seeing the different perspectives from people who had to deal with what is now our vintage computers! I always wondered why the Macs could read Mac or Windows formatted disks right out of the box but windows choked on anything but it's own format, and needed special drivers etc to read both (and often to even recognize its own hardware!) I never understood why people wouldn't just ask what format the printshop or whatever could accept (they'd assume it would "just work" like it did in their home or office) and why so many businesses (not all, but many I remember dealing with and even some still to this day!) didn't specify when initially dealing with a client what the client had vs what they had. Tony
On 03/08/2018 12:14 PM, Tony Bogan via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I never understood why people wouldn't just ask what format the printshop or whatever could accept (they'd assume it would "just work" like it did in their home or office) and why so many businesses (not all, but many I remember dealing with and even some still to this day!) didn't specify when initially dealing with a client what the client had vs what they had.
My brother-in-law works in printing and he runs into thsi all the time. Basically the customers don't care. They'll pay for the special handling rather than follow the requirements. A lot of them are of the mind set: here's a lump of lead, turn it into gold. Since I've worked on a lot of systems I can say that Windows wass totally inflexible on using using anything other than their standards. I could move between many systems without too much grief. -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry@linuxha.com http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog Author of: Linux Smart Homes For Dummies
On 3/8/2018 12:14 PM, Tony Bogan wrote:
It's actually funny seeing the different perspectives from people who had to deal with what is now our vintage computers! I always wondered why the Macs could read Mac or Windows formatted disks right out of the box but windows choked on anything but it's own format, and needed special drivers etc to read both (and often to even recognize its own hardware!)
I never understood why people wouldn't just ask what format the printshop or whatever could accept (they'd assume it would "just work" like it did in their home or office) and why so many businesses (not all, but many I remember dealing with and even some still to this day!) didn't specify when initially dealing with a client what the client had vs what they had.
Tony
Well, in the era, the "Mac" world and the "Windows" world, were two very different worlds. It was hard for people in one "world" to deal with those from the other. And, you had to go out of your way in one world, to accommodate programs and files from the other world. Files *content* had to be "imported" or "exported", although there were some universal file-content standards. Hard to imagine today, people who lived entirely in their own worlds. But file *systems* were very different. A file system is what you do, when you "format" a diskette or hard drive. The mac file system, included much more information about a file than WIndows/MS-DOS file systems. That's why in the old Mac world, you could click on a file and the correct program would "just run it"; not so much, in the Windows world, which depended on the "file extension" (still does). "why didn't people just ask the printshop, 'what format do you want?'" - Answer - those people did not know what "format" meant. The file ran fine on THEIR computer - what's the problem? As personal computers became consumer products or production tools, users became consumers, not techie experts. You might as well ask "why don't people know to change the oil in their cars?" Today, people don't know how to backup their own files! I gotta shovel some snow. Nice discussion. HErb apologizing for history -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net
It's actually funny seeing the different perspectives from people who had to deal with what is now our vintage computers! I always wondered why the Macs could read Mac or Windows formatted disks right out of the box but windows choked on anything but it's own format, and needed special drivers etc to read both (and often to even recognize its own hardware!)
Oh, it's a physical thing. The Mac 800K floppy shares (I believe) the same formatting as the Amiga. While the Atari ST and DOS PC 720K had their own different way that was usually incompatible. I was actually able to write Mac formatted floppies from a DOS PC with this software called executor I believe. It was able to bit bang the floppy controller and do the undoable without special hardware. That was how I managed to get software from my Dos systems over to a IISI, IIFX, IIX and other systems I dragged home from a thrift store way back when. Sweet Radius 21" monitors on strange video cards. Those were the days! These days to get stuff onto my SE/30 I think I would use a USB floppy drive on a G4 powerbook. At some point OSX dropped the ability to handle Mac formatted floppies. I do believe the SE/30 has the superdrive or whatever the higher density drive is that opens the door to easier movement of disks between non-Mac and Mac. Others can correct me on all this, was a DOS kid not an Apple hardcore. OSX (NeXTStep) is good. I'll take that over a Windows 10 desktop any day.
Tony
On Mar 8, 2018, at 12:14 PM, Tony Bogan via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
It's actually funny seeing the different perspectives from people who had to deal with what is now our vintage computers! I always wondered why the Macs could read Mac or Windows formatted disks right out of the box but windows choked on anything but it's own format, and needed special drivers etc to read both (and often to even recognize its own hardware!)
It's purely a market incentive thing. To survive in a PC-dominated world, Apple had to make the Mac OS read PC disks. Microsoft, IBM and all the rest never had a financial incentive to do so, and because it would have required additional hardware to read GCR disks, it was never really going to happen. Interestingly, the IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) chip used in early Macs and the Apple IIc and beyond wasn't much more than a single-chip version of the Disk II controller and could only handle GCR (400/800k) formatting, so early Macs can't read PC disks. The SWIM chip introduced in the Mac II/SE FDHD line added PC-compatible MFM formatting, used for 360k/720k/1.44M disks. The ISM (Integrated Sanders Machine) used to read both GCR and MFM formats with the same state machine is a real work of art; read the docs some time (I have copies here that I should really upload to The Archive). So Mac formatted HD floppies use the same low-level formatting as PC floppies, which means PCs are actually able to read them, but because there's no HFS filesystem driver included in Windows, the ability to do that was left to a rather niche third-party market (the small amount of sales those drivers saw tells you all you need to know about how right Microsoft was not to spend time implementing it).
I never understood why people wouldn't just ask what format the printshop or whatever could accept (they'd assume it would "just work" like it did in their home or office) and why so many businesses (not all, but many I remember dealing with and even some still to this day!) didn't specify when initially dealing with a client what the client had vs what they had.
You're assuming people who deal with printing understand filesystems. We still have the same problem with USB drives. Responding to Anthony's question about why anyone would ever format portable media to Mac format, well, there are two reasons: 1) because Apple's filesystems are built for its operating systems, they work better (for example, it took forever before anything other than 8.3 filenames worked on DOS disks on Mac OS, and there's metadata that the Mac uses that just isn't supported on other filesystems), and 2) when you format a disk in a system, the native format is usually the default. But yes, you can specify ahead of time what format things need to be, but in my experience in retail and consulting, the paper you write those instructions on is probably put to better use by stacking it near the toilet. Customers don't read that stuff, and if they do, they don't always understand or remember. - Dave
I hear you about the formats etc, my comment was how I thought/felt back then. 30 years later I get it. As to the swim chip that was truly when Macs could handle multiple disk formats. Prior to that you were pretty much stuck with Macs using Mac disks! Same goes for the customer/vendor issue. My comments were about "back in the day." I've said many times I could add a line into our contracts requiring, in addition to the monies owed, the title to your car, first born, etc. and 9 out of 10 people would sign it and send it back without ever reading it. So yes, the paper it would be written on is worth even less than toilet paper ;-) Tony
On 3/8/2018 11:58 AM, Ethan O'Toole wrote:
Oh and on the crusty macs the whole file fork thing.
When I worked at Simon and Schuster in the early 90s, we were 50/50 split PCs and Macs. No issues with file exchange, as the application document formats were common across both, so no issues with resource forks. We instructed vendors to use only FAT formatted media, and we had Appletalk to Ethernet bridges installed for older Macs that needed it. I cannot recall one time not being able to transfer a file across platforms, as long as there was an appropriate application. On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 12:20 PM Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On 3/8/2018 11:58 AM, Ethan O'Toole wrote:
Oh and on the crusty macs the whole file fork thing.
On 03/08/2018 12:33 PM, Dean Notarnicola via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
When I worked at Simon and Schuster in the early 90s, we were 50/50 split PCs and Macs. No issues with file exchange, as the application document formats were common across both, so no issues with resource forks. We instructed vendors to use only FAT formatted media, and we had Appletalk to Ethernet bridges installed for older Macs that needed it. I cannot recall one time not being able to transfer a file across platforms, as long as there was an appropriate application.
On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 12:20 PM Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On 3/8/2018 11:58 AM, Ethan O'Toole wrote:
Oh and on the crusty macs the whole file fork thing.
We used Macs in our engineering documents for network design. Other than MS Word having bugs transfer across networks worked decently. I recall a few issues that a set of rules fixed. But we were engineers and part of a larger company. I also had a customer who had everything! XNS, PUP, Vinse, Novel, SMB, DECNet, AppleTalk, EtherTalk, SNA, BiSync, HP printing (weird bridge protocl) and IP. I'm sure I forgot a few. They had specific rules but most of there data was headed to the Mainframe of the DEC networks. Large companies tend to work out rules to follow. -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry@linuxha.com http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog Author of: Linux Smart Homes For Dummies
Thank God I periodically read this stuff or I found be totally ignorant.
-----Original Message----- From: vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic- bounces@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> On Behalf Of Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic Sent: Thursday, March 8, 2018 12:20 PM To: vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> Cc: Herb Johnson <hjohnson@retrotechnology.info> Subject: Re: [vcf-midatlantic] vcf-midatlantic] Mac OS 7.1 Terminal Emulator & BBS software
On 3/8/2018 11:58 AM, Ethan O'Toole wrote:
Oh and on the crusty macs the whole file fork thing.
On Mar 8, 2018, at 11:58 AM, Ethan O'Toole via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
A reason I always wondered why anyone would use the Mac format. You cant believe how often we'd get media at work delivered on Mac formatted disks, and we PAID those people! If you pay someone, in my opinion, you should
Oh and on the crusty macs the whole file fork thing. You could copy an archive file or binary to a MAC via whatever means and it just showed up as an unusable blob without other utilities to change some thing about it so it could execute or so the archive programs could unarchive it.
The resource fork is actually a really great concept, but it wasn't very transferrable to file systems (such as FAT) which have no concept of a file with multiple partitions. Interestingly enough, NTFS supports multiple named forks, and most POSIX filesystems support the concept of "extended attributes" (xattrs) which are the same thing. Apple was just ahead of its time... *ducks* In Mac OS X, they've pretty much deprecated resource forks (though they still work just fine) in favor of the NeXT-inspired approach of "bundles", which is just putting everything into a directory that gets treated like a single file. For example, all OS X applications (.app bundles) are just folders full of resource files, metadata and the actual application executables. It's a lot more transportable over foreign filesystems, which I suspect was part of the reason for going that way, but it preserves a lot of what was great about the Mac's Resource Fork. - Dave
On 3/8/2018 11:39 AM, Anthony Becker wrote:
IIRC, both windows and mac could read windows formatted Zip disks. Only Mac could read Mac formatted (though there is software for Windows that allows reading Mac disks).
A reason I always wondered why anyone would use the Mac format.
All the Macs from Apple, sold with ZIP drives, probably.
You cant believe how often we'd get media at work delivered on Mac formatted disks, and we PAID those people! If you pay someone, in my opinion, you should also dictate how the item is delivered. Back then the drivers to access Mac disks on Windows was always buggy and prone to crashing. So we had to buy a Mac just to be able to receive files from these people. Probably a good half of Mac sales back then were people having to buy them in order to access files from Mac users who had no idea how to save things to they could be more widely accessed.
You know, you have a right to not like Macs, and to say so. But pardon me, you don't have a right to make up statistics. This 50% remark spoils an otherwise reasonable review of ZIP technology. This is not a request to argue Mac vs Windows; you are welcome to your opinion, I find the argument unproductive, myself.
Yea Zip technology was great the click of death issues aside.
An issue limited to a small and late run of drives. Eventually Iomega made good on many claims of bad drives and damaged disks. This is a legitimate comment, but I call it out because many retrospective articles on ZIP disk technology point to this as "proof" the entire technology was flawed.
They still to this day are great for retro systems with HD controllers in order to easily make backups of your system at the very least, and to transfer between systems as your collection inevitably grows. Bernouli and Syquest drives predated them but were never as widespread or good, media was also a lot larger and less portable. Zip made large portable storage affordable until burnable CDs became more widespread, reliable and cheaper. Though once CDs did, it marked the end for the dominance of the Zip drive.
I agree with these remarks. early CD-writable drives were brand-specific and so you needed drivers for each. at some point - I don't really know the details - the drives became non-brand specific, and operating systems incorporated them. I'd be curious to know those details, another day.
Another good drive and as maligned was the Cliq. 40MB in a small format that could fit into a PCMCIA slot in a laptop. great for making a quick backup of files while on the go to prevent data loss, or to get them to transfer them.
There were quite a number of storage technologies. But as personal computers became commodity items, part of that process included the need for storage technology to be generic and "just work". ZIP drives and disks mostly fell into that category; the Mac/MS-DOS format problem was the more difficult obstacle to that end, as you pointed out. But that was a part of the larger Apple vs Microsoft/Windows competition. Herb Johnson it's all good -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net
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