I picked up an external SCSI hard drive at a garage sale this weekend. Listening to the RetroMacCast has left me wanting to play with the Mac Plus in our spare bedroom and see what I can do it with. I have System 6.0.8 floppies, so there’s a lot of things I can do with it in theory.

But that theory hit the brick wall of practice last night when I tried hooking up the hard drive. Apple’s “HD SC Setup” program only recognizes Apple branded hard drives, not the LaCie I bought. I turned to Google for answers, and found that there were third-party hard disk formatters for the early Macs, as well as a one-byte patch for “HD SC Setup” itself. All I had to do was download the files and copy them to an 800K Mac floppy. Oh, one catch: USB floppy drives won’t write to 800K floppies.

I spent the last hour this morning reading Jef Raskin’s “Book of Macintosh“, a compendium of essays and notes from the preliminary stages of Macintosh design. One thing that stood out was Raskin’s insistance that Macintosh’s hardware didn’t need to be anything special, because the real value of the Mac was the ease of connecting it to a network. The Mac was supposed to be just another node on a LAN, Tymnet, or even ARPANet.

Last night, I reviewed my options, and none were pleasant. To get the software I need in a format my Mac Plus can handle, I have to track down a Mac G3 computer that still has a floppy drive capable of writing 800K disks, or spend $150 on an Ethernet adapter that plugs into the SCSI port. Or, and this is the route I will probably go, I can find someone who already has a networked classic Mac who can get me some software, including those hard drive utilities. I’m sure someone in the chiclassiccomp group can help me.