How to get files off a Power Mac 8500 running Mac OS 8.1

[cplum]

I've been toying around with my old Power Mac 8500. It has a CD-ROM drive and Floppy Disk drive. Getting stuff on it is a pain. To move some files onto it I had to burn a CD using my Power Mac G4. That's not possible in the other direction since the 8500 can't burn CDs. What are some of my options here?

• I was thinking maybe an external SCSI drive, but Ebay shows slim pickings of questionable devices that are too expensive to gamble on.
• I have an old external Zip drive with a SCSI interface (DB25). I'm lacking a cable for it, and I'm lacking confidence that the drive even works, but I might order a cable anyway and try.
• The 8500 has a floppy. What are my options for a floppy on the G4, and am I just likely to have issues with the old media and clunky drives?
• What are the networking file sharing options? I seem to recall back in the day using the Chooser to pick a file shared volume over the network, but I think that might have required that the file share server have a special sever version of Mac OS. Can I volume share on my G4 running the standard 9.2.2 or 10.4.11, and just run an Ethernet cable between the two devices to access it?

 

[weaztek]

I'll make the obvious suggestion... If the files aren't too large could you use a free web service like wetransfer.com (up to 2GB) and/or dropbox.com (2.75GB) to deliver them to yourself over the internet?

 

[cplum]

I'll make the obvious suggestion... If the files aren't too large could you use a free web service like wetransfer.com (up to 2GB) and/or dropbox.com (2.75GB) to deliver them to yourself over the internet?

The problem there is with outdated browsers running on the old systems. I fired up Netscape 4.5 (circa 1998) as it seems to be the browser I used back in the day. For any site that redirects to https (which is most of them), I get an error dialog saying that they have no common encryption algorithms. I did manage to bring up www.google.com (which does not redirect to https), but beyond that not much luck with other sites.

 

[BrianBaughn]

If the floppy writer will still work give it a shot. A pack of 10 1.44MB floppies will cost you more than a Mac-compatible USB connected floppy reader.

 

[cplum]

If the floppy writer will still work give it a shot. A pack of 10 1.44MB floppies will cost you more than a Mac-compatible USB connected floppy reader.

Wow, I didn't realize you could get a USB floppy disk reader for so cheap. Would be good if it could write also (so I don't have to go the CD-ROM route in the other dirction), but I'm not seeing any that can write. I'll at least give the floppy in the 8500 a spin and see if it seems to write ok. If so, the USB reader is probably worth getting.

 

[cplum]

I attempted to connect to a file share server using the Chooser. I have couple if iMacs with file sharing enable. One is Sonoma 14.6.1. It doesn't support AFP any more, and the Chooser quickly gave me an error saying it couldn't connect. The other is High Sierra 10.13.6. It still supports AFP, but when I tried to connect to it I got an error saying it uses an incompatible version of AFP. I would try my G4 as a server (running 10.4.11), but at the moment I only have one monitor, ethernet cable, and power cord to split between the 8500 and G4 (they had both been getting dusty in the closet for a long time before I just recently pulled them out to play around with them). I'll see if I can remedy that.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Have you looked into some sort of FTP solution…like creating a server on the System 8 machine?

 

[cplum]

Have you looked into some sort of FTP solution…like creating a server on the System 8 machine?

I considered it. I noticed on the 8500 I have a ftp client called Fetch. So now it's a matter of getting a server running on one of my other machines. This used to be easy under OSX. Just enable the ftp services from the Sharing settings, but that's no longer available on the OSX running on my 2 iMacs. It does still seem to be available on the G4 running 10.4.11, but then we are back to the issue I mentioned above on me not having the cables and monitors needed to have both the 8500 and G4 running at the same time. I hope to remedy that soon.

 

[cplum]

Hmm. Thought I had posted a while back that I was able to get file share access working with the G4 running 10.14.11, and was also able to ftp to/from the G4. I had to use TCP/IP for file share. With AppleTalk the Chooser did show the AppleShare volume, but after I provided credentials it would then fail with some unhelpful error message (like "connecting to AppleShare volume failed").

Another solution I got working is with SCSI. The G4 has a SCSI card. I got a ribbon cable for it, pulled the SCSI drive from the 8500 and connected it to the G4, and it mounts just fine. So this would be good option if I had to copy a lot of files, although using file share is easier and probably copies fast enough. It was fun however putting to use a 24 year old SCSI card that I had previously never even considered using.