AppleTalking With A 128K

AppleTalking With A 128K

I have one Vintage Macintosh I try to maintain, my 128K which I use from time to time. That’s the main reason I developed the MacTerminal file transfer method as there simply is no other way to get files into and out of it. However, for many of you, a 128K may be just one in your collection of Vintage Macs. Even so, you are still unable to use a 128K on any kind of network, though you may use AppleShare easily from a 512K all the way up to the last of the G5 Macs as long as you’re running OS X Jaguar or less. So, for Vintage Macs with limited file sizes, the MacTerminal method will still come in handy with Macs running Panther or better. Certainly you have many more options with newer Macs that have both 1.4MB floppy drives, SCSI as well as Ethernet and the ability to run TCP/IP stacks to directly address OS X Panther and Tiger. But what about your lowly 128K?

In 1985, Apple introduced with a poorly received SuperBowl commercial, the Macintosh Office. Basically it introduced a networked LaserPrinter and a pricey way to connect your Macs, but otherwise no network. But Sun & Infosphere churned out TOPS & MacServe respectively.

I’ll admit, much of what was going on in the Mac world before the Macintosh Plus (circa 1986) is unknown to me firsthand and from 1987 onward, plug-n-play AppleTalk networking was just a given. That’s why looking back on the history of AppleTalk, I am perplexed that there was ever an issue with providing a Macintosh office environment in those early days, now that I have discovered the existence of MacServe and Tops. From 1984, both Infosphere (MacServe) and Centrum Systems West (later Sun Microsystems’ TOPS) began developing networks based on AppleTalk technology (previously AppleNet, then AppleBus) which had been built into the Lisa and Macintosh from the beginning. By 1985 and the announcement of Macintosh Office, both companies had incredible products ready to connect that office, with TOPS even able to network with PCs. So what happened?

Disk Sharing

Disk sharing is basically the ability to share a single hard disk on a network. In the days when hard disks could cost as much as the Macintosh itself, that was an important option. Basically a user could mount a remote disk on their desktop and transfer files into and out of it, just like an attached floppy disk. Unlike AppleShare, while one user mounted the disk, no other users had access.

MacServe took advantage of the only Macintosh that had a hard disk and the power to run a server at the time and was aptly named XL/Serve when it was first released. The 512K had the ability to run it, but much to the chagrin of many, no reliable hard disk (thanks to Apple’s mandates). But it made full use of the Macintosh Office. In addition to disk sharing, MacServe offered printer spooling and handled all network printing tasks, basically taking the print job from the individual user’s Mac so they could continue working and parcel it out to the networked printer along with any other print jobs executed simultaneously. But the real magic was the disk sharing. And it wasn’t just access to one hard drive, either, but individual access to multiple partitions on the hard disk. Essentially, the administrator would set up partitions or volumes (initially MFS, but eventually MFS and HFS) for each user on the network and/or public volumes, read only volumes, “drop boxes” and private password protected volumes. Each individual user’s Mac remains private and only files intended for general or private sharing are placed on the networked disk. However, server copies can be set up for any individual attached hard disk on the system and those may be shared as well. Then, each attached Mac using a Desk Accessory mounts any of the available volumes on the desktop. Only the volume mounted is reported in use and unavailable to other users, not the entire hard disk. What this means for a practical network is that each user can have a partition on the networked hard drive on which to store and backup files just like having an hard disk attached to their own Mac. Once a document is ready to share, it’s a matter of mounting one of the public volumes or another user’s partition and copying the file over the network from one to the other.

Much of what I have read about MacServe has been positive, praising its stability and reliability and resilience in the face of network crashes that would normally bring down every computer attached and require a system-wide network reboot on other file sharing software of the time. However, one major complaint is the inability to access the same volume simultaneously as file sharing would allow. Nevertheless, I do not see this as a major obstacle. If the disk server is set up properly, there is little need to linger on a shared volume. Simply access it, update, place, copy or remove files and log off. I have never been a big fan of working on and saving changes to a document over a network. It’s slow today and would have been even slower then. The only exception to this is a real-time database which by definition needs one file. Though with a little coordination even that isn’t an insurmountable problem in most offices. By today’s standards and for my purposes here, it is the missing-link for enabling network file transfers on the early Macs. Unfortunately, as of this writing, the 128K Macintosh is not supported by XL/Serve 1.1, released in July of 1985 with System 2.0Finder 4.1. However, I hold out hope the original version (1.0?), released in March 1985 (with System 1.1/Finder 1.1g), did support the 128K.

MacServe probably met its demise as real-time file sharing options began to evolve and hard drive prices began to drop, not to mention that with the emergence of the Mac Plus and HFS, the MFS based MacServe began to have problems associated with the new HFS file structures, particularly the RAM-based HFS associated with the numerous Mac 512Ks that were using it with the new Hard Disk 20. By 1987, AppleShare was introduced and that, as they say, was that.

File Sharing

Before AppleShare, several companies were developing real-time file sharing networks for Macintosh to use with UNIX and IBM fileservers, cross-compatibility being of major concern for those vendors. Unlike MacServe, the networked hard disk volumes could be accessed simultaneously by multiple users. However, unlike MacServe most of them required a dedicated server and any other Mac or PC on the network, hard drive equipped or not, was merely a workstation that could only interface with other users through the central file server.

The more I learn about Sun Microsystems TOPS, the more I cannot understand why it was not the dominant file sharing software in the business, to this day. In addition to be being a stable real-time file sharing network platform on the Macintosh from the time AppleTalk was introduced, it was cross compatible with Unix and PC environments and servers, offered printer spooling services like MacServe and optional e-mail software for inter-office and telnet communications. Not only that, but TOPS did not require a dedicated server. Each Macintosh on the network could play both host and client. When AppleShare finally did hit the stage 2 years later, it was not until System 7 almost 5 years later that it too offered peer-to-peer file sharing. Like the original Lisa OS, TOPS offered all of these advanced features years before it Apple began to add them back into the Mac OS starting with System 7 and later.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at this archival footage from October 1985. About halfway through they begin a fascinating TOPS demonstration on what appears to be a Mac 512K. I would like to believe TOPS worked with the original Macintosh, but the nature of how AppleTalk is implemented on the RAM starved 128K means that the 128K could not be an active client and definitely not a host. At most, the 128K might have been able to log onto a host to exchange files, but that’s about it. Opening a document would have been out of the question since loading the application would have reinitialized the system heap. An advertisement in a Spring 1985 issue of The Macintosh Buyer’s Guide indicates that the April release (presumably v1.0) would work on a 128K and 512K. I do hope to eventually obtain copies of the earliest versions of TOPS one day and properly confirm this. I do know that TOPS v.2.0 is not compatible with v.1.0 citing developments with the HFS filing system and Mac Plus, and does not support the 128K Macintosh. For now, this information serves as a fascinating look at what might have been and an option for file sharing on early Macintosh systems which begin excluding the 512K series with AppleShare 2.0, which by the way still did not implement all of the features of TOPS. As for why TOPS went the way of the dodo, losing out to inferior AppleShare ... your guess is as good as mine. Sun is still a viable company and during the 80s was as substantial a force as Apple. Perhaps they were simply out marketed by Apple. For now, TOPS is the only hope for high speed (230K baud) file sharing on the 128K Macintosh with the potential for Ethernet bridging with modern Macs.

Both TOPS and MacServe seem as though they never existed today, which given what they offered seems like an impossibility. Yet, digging around the web and reading histories about Apple, you’d never know they actually delivered on the promise of the Macintosh Office. Perhaps they catered solely to business users who even early on seemed to favor the PC. Seeing an unprofitable market, maybe they simply abandoned it in light of Apple developing and marketing a simplified version of networking software for the “rest of us”.

Macintosh Office

Mac Serve

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TOPS