The network card for my ancient Mac arrived yesterday but I was at the garage getting our car repaired, so I didn’t get time to work on it. I found time today (strangely enough), and had a few issues getting the network to actually work. The machine had System 7.1, which is so old that it doesn’t have a standard TCP/IP stack, meaning that it might have worked if connected to an Apple server, but certainly didn’t work with a standard DHCP server like my Linux gateway.

So, I needed to upgrade it to System 7.5.3, which was the first version of the OS to use Open Transport. OT is still pretty hoary compared to what you get in OS X, but it does the job. The obstacle in front of me was that the Mac had no functioning network and no CD-ROM, so I didn’t have a fast way to get the installer onto the machine. Instead, I had to download 19 disk images with the PowerBook, copy them across to the PC over the LAN and write them to floppy disks (the PowerBook has no floppy drive), then use the good old sneakernet to get them onto the Mac. Fortunately the Mac could read PC format disks without a problem.

Anyhow, the end result can be seen below - the Mac online, looking at this website and a picture of itself.

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