The hard disk had System 7.5 installed. With a Daynaport Ethernet card and plenty of memory available, I wanted to get as much network capability as possible. There is a very good networking guide here:
http://www.applefool.com/se30/
I won’t describe the hoops i went through to make the OS installation disks back in 2018, because nobody would do it the same way now. Greaseweazle is now available and is a much easier way to write disks. A FloppyEmu is an alternative method, which emulates a floppy disk drive, and avoids the need for floppy disks at all.
At least the SE/30 can read PC format 1.44MB disks. I installed System 7.5.3 and then System 7.5.5 from images downloaded from the web.
To get the networking running required the drivers and some additional files for the Daynaport network card and Open Transport. Transfer of unarchived files from anything other than a mac running a classic operating system is a frustrating experience.
The old Macintosh OS used a novel file system that had two forks stored under the one filename. Once they come through a PC (or virtually any other computer) one of the forks has disappeared so that the resulting file is often unusable once transferred.
There are some specific formats that survive the process – Stuffit and binary files, although sometimes these need to be opened from the Stuffit application – the application associations are lost when the resource fork disappears.
Those archives, once transferred to the SE/30 can then be unpacked in their native environment which retains the resource fork.
Once open transport and either a browser or FTP client are setup, files can be downloaded without any need for floppies or serial transfers. Serial transfers were required for files larger than 1.4MB.
There was a version of Stuffit on the hard drive already, and i was able to transfer Mackermit across via a floppy disk.
Then I made up a serial cable to connect from the SE/30 to a PC. I used kermit95 to transfer the files I needed across to the SE/30. It’s important to configure Kermit to use the binary protocol.
Using kermit I transferred:
- Daynaport Installer
- Open Transport 1.3
- Internet Explorer 3.01
- Netpresenz (ftp server)
The Daynaport card has a significant limitation in that it only seems to support half-duplex operation. This means that the connecting device needs to be able to be configured for 10Mbit half-duplex.
At the time i didn’t have a managed switch (i now have several), so I added a second card to a PC, configured it as required, and then bridged the networks. This required a crossover cable to the mac.
This allowed primitive browsing (forget https) including downloading of files. I found that although it was difficult to browse to a file, it was possible to discover it on another computer and then type in the (nearly always) lengthy url into Internet Explorer 3.01 to complete the download.
FTP as a client or server is also quite viable.
With the SE/30 setup, it was much easier to set up other Macintoshes.