So, you have a bare metal classic Macintosh, but no software for it? How do you get software over to it? How do you get it to even boot? Here, I will unravel my advice that I have developed over the years of working with and researching classic Macintosh software.
-
You need a system disk to boot. To get a system disk for your Macintosh, you must ascertain the particular hardware vintage of it to determine compatibility. There are a few main lines of Macintosh compatibility here.
- “Old world” Macintoshes:
- 400K floppy disk drive Macintoshes
- 800K floppy disk drive Macintoshes
- 1.44 MB floppy disk Macintoshes
- Macintosh Classic includes system disk image in ROM
- Macintoshes equipped with bootable CD-ROM drives
- “New world” Macs:
- OpenFirmware PowerPC Macs.
- EFI PowerPC Macs.
- EFI Intel Macs.
- “Old world” Macintoshes:
Suffice it to say, booting new world Macintoshes is easy: just build a Macintosh bootable CD-R disc and insert that into the CD-ROM drive. Likewise with the last of the old world Macintoshes that included CD-ROM drives, and also the Macintosh Classic. For Macintoshes equipped with a 1.44 MB floppy disk drive, you can write the raw disk image on a standard PC internal or USB floppy disk drive. It is the old old world Macintoshes that are difficult to boot, due to the difficulty of building the non-standard floppy disks.
So, how do you build such a floppy disk? There are a few main ways.
-
Conventional “brand loyal” Mac user: Get a Macintosh that is new enough to be able to access moderm media such as bootable CD-ROMs but old enough to support 800K floppy disk drives. Boot the new Macintosh and use DiskCopy to write out the 400K or 800K system disk images.
-
Clever PC user and early home computer enthusiast: Get an Apple II computer with a serial port and an Apple II 3.5 inch floppy disk drive. You’ll be able to use Apple Disk Transfer ProDOS to (1) bootstrap the Apple II from bare metal and (2) write out Macintosh 400K and 800K disk images.
-
Old fashioned hardware maven: Get yourself a CatWeasel and attach it to a PC. This is a custom floppy disk controller that will allow you to write out 400K and 800K style Macintosh floppy disks from a PC.
-
Modern hardware maven: Get yourself a SCSI2SD adapter. With this clever trick, you will be able to construct, via a Macintosh emulator, a bootable hard disk image that can be written out to the SD card. The SCSI2SD adapter can then be attached to SCSI-enabled Macintoshes either externally or internally.
-
If you have a Macintosh hard drive, you’re going to want to make sure you build a floppy disk image containing Apple HD SC Setup so that you can initialize your hard drive.
-
In addition to the system disk needed to boot your Macintosh, from a practical standpoint, you also want some useful communications and networking software so that you can send additional software directly to your Macintosh. My recommendation for old world Macintoshes is to make serial communications your #1 priority.
-
Get either ZTerm or Macintosh Kermit onto either your boot disk or another floppy disk.
-
You need a bare, minimalistic way to unpack the data and resource forks of Macintosh application files downloaded via a serial connection. If your serial communications program does not do this automatically for you (I haven’t tested any yet), put binunpk on a floppy disk too.
-
-
With the previously specified bare minimums in place, you can easily copy over more generally useful software through the serial connection. Here is a top priority list.
- Stuffit Expander 4.0.1
- DiskCopy 4.2
- MacTCP, MacPPP, ConfigPPP
- Fetch (FTP client)
- NCSA Telnet
- Some web browser (???)
If you’re operating a classic Macintosh with at least 1 MB of RAM and a hard drive, you should now have a full-fledged Internet connected Macintosh. Regarding the setup of the PPP connection required for TCP/IP communications, I have detailed that in a previous article that effectively allows you to use a Raspberry Pi as a “modern modem” in place of your traditional modem.
New world Macs with a CD-ROM drive? Heck, don’t bother me about there being any particular challenge, you can practically load as much core operating system software as you want onto a single CD-ROM.