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Mac 512Ke Advice

davecom

davecom

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 10, 2009
124
36
Hi guys,

I recently purchased a booting (to ? disk startup screen at least) Mac 512Ke and accompanying keyboard. I'm ordering a mouse for it on eBay. Do you have any tips about its maintenance? Also how do I create an 800K startup disk for it? I was going to get a USB floppy drive. When I insert a disk into it and power it on it seems to just spit it out. If I put it back in after it's on, nothing happens. I thought I had an appropriate disk, but it's possible it's not (from my Mac LC days as a kid).

The case is very yellow from weathering. Any particular cleaners I should use on it? I don't want to further damage it.

I was going to get a slim 6.0.8 on it, unless someone has other recommendations. Might be cool to run System 1.

Thanks in advance.
 
Unfortunately, it is not possible to create a Macintosh 800K disk from a modern USB floppy drive - the early Macintosh used a completely different physical format than PCs of the time. Only a supplied-by-Apple internal floppy drive can write Apple's 800K format. (With a few extremely oddball exceptions.)

You have two reasonable options:

1. Buy a boot disk. (eBay, Craigslist, etc. There's a private individual selling them at http://www.rescuemyclassicmac.com - I have no affiliation with that site, never even used it before, but I've seen others post positive experiences.)

2. Buy a floppy emulator - the major one is http://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/ - these allow you to load disk images onto an SD card, and the device pretends to be an actual Mac floppy drive.
 
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As @Anonymous Freak say, you must have a Mac with an internal floppy drive to be able to create 400 and 800K disks.

I will add in that if you're going to play with older Macs very much, a "bridge" machine is a great investment. I REALLY like the x600 series Macs and the beige G3s for this role. Booted into OS 9 or earlier, you can write 400K and 800K disks using the internal drive. Most have internal ZIP drives and under 8.6 and later, you can read/write USB drives with a compatible USB card installed(albeit at USB 1.1 speeds). Plus, using Classilla-an up to date Firefox fork, you can download files directly to these computers.

You can even run OS X Tiger on these computers(not suggested for real use on a stock 8600/9600 although it's possible and I've done it) and use TenFourFox to browse the internet. The big caveat is that OS X doesn't give you access to the internal floppy drive or the legacy serial ports.
 
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Well, you can access the legacy serial ports in OS X, you just can't use LocalTalk/serial networking. You can still connect serially to devices. Such as opening a serial terminal connection on an old system to the command prompt on the OS X Mac. (Some configuration required.).

OS X can even print to old Apple serial printers, as long as they're *SERIAL* connection, not AppleTalk-over-serial connection. (I used my ancient Personal LaserWriter 300 on my Power Mac G4 with Griffin gPort that way.)
 
Anonymous Freak said:
Well, you can access the legacy serial ports in OS X, you just can't use LocalTalk/serial networking. You can still connect serially to devices. Such as opening a serial terminal connection on an old system to the command prompt on the OS X Mac. (Some configuration required.).

OS X can even print to old Apple serial printers, as long as they're *SERIAL* connection, not AppleTalk-over-serial connection. (I used my ancient Personal LaserWriter 300 on my Power Mac G4 with Griffin gPort that way.)
Click to expand...

I guess that's what I'm thinking, and also the fact that my main uses for serial ports are for local talk :)

Looks like it may be time to dig out the Laserwriter 300 and play with it...or even at that I have a closet full of Stylewriters and Imagewriters.

I have a couple of Stealths and Griffins floating around...in fact I've been known to buy a G3 or G4 tower just because it had one :)

BTW, my Xserve G5 has a DB-9 RS232 port. I let a friend poke around on it in Teamviewer, and he finally managed to find it listed as a "modem." My best guess is that it MIGHT be there to act as a UPS interface, since I know a lot of them did use RS232 to communicate their status to the computer.
 
Anonymous Freak said:
Yup. UPS interface, or direct serial terminal access. Lost of server farms have serial console access handy, but not KVM.
Click to expand...

Aside from the lack of KVM, there's also the fact that these only came BTO with a video card, and most don't have one.

My IBM SystemX rackmounts have basic on-board video. They also have a DB-9 port on the front.

As much as I love Xserves, IMO products from other vendors(namely the IBMs I use) are much better thought out than Xserves. The main thing that comes to mind is the lack of front ports-the early Xserve only has a single Firewire 400 on the front, with it finally getting switched to USB not long before the product was discontinued. There's a decent collection of ports on the back, but of course they're an absolute pain in the butt to access when the machine is in a rack.

Contrast that with my IBMs, which have a couple of USBs, RS-232, and DB-25 VGA on the front. Yes, they're ugly compared to the sleek and elegant Xserve, but in a server room it would be a LOT easier to roll up a serial terminal or monitor/KB/Mouse to work on the server.
 
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