[TommyL]

Hey everybody... once again i have a question. I currently own the original 1984 Macintosh. The System Floppy Disk that it came with was pretty mis-shapen when i got it. 2 Questions

1) Do you know where i can find the same operating system online?? Can i download it from a website?

2) How do i reformat a 1.44 MB disk so that this macintosh can read from it? I currently have an iMac with an external floppy drive... but i dont know how to reformat a disk so that it is only 360 or 720k. I dont know which it is.

Thanks a lot!!

Tommy

[neutrino23]

If you are in the Bay Area try going to Weird Stuff or Halted Specialties. You might be able to find a box of old Mac disks laying around. Also, try asking the guys at Halted Specialties. You should also look around for old CDs from BMUG. There was a time that when a new OS came out Apple let groups distribute the old OS for free. The oldest OS I recall seeing was System 4. Also try looking in the back of MW magazine to fine companies that support old Macs.

You can't format the disk without an older Mac. Somewhere along the line support for 400K disks and then 800K disks was given up.

Before then you simply put in a disk and if it was blank a dialog would come up and ask you if you wanted to format the disk. If you said yes you could select the format from a pull down menu. If the disk was already formatted then you would select it and choose Format Disk as you do now.

Try
http://www.mac512.com/

They used to have everything from System 1 onward.

[philzilla]

used to. it looks like Apple set the dogs on them...

[zac4mac]

did a little poking around there, and got this:
ftp://ftp.crihan.fr/pub/mactools/old/macos/
1984 Mac should use 400k disks I think. Hard to remember that far back
My first was a 512ke and it had an 800k drive.

Z

[Walter J. Ferstl]

Originally posted by zac4mac:
<STRONG>did a little poking around there, and got this:
ftp://ftp.crihan.fr/pub/mactools/old/macos/
1984 Mac should use 400k disks I think. Hard to remember that far back
My first was a 512ke and it had an 800k drive.

Z</STRONG>

My first Mac was a 512ke, too and it had an internal 800k drive plus an 800k external one ;-)

TommyL,

if you can get some 800k floppy disks (second hand, of course), called "double sided, double density" DS/DD, it should be possible to format them as single sided, i.e. SS/DD to a raw capacity of 400k, usable on the 128k Mac. Remember, these 800k floppies are all old and used, so if you can get five of them, take them all....

The 400k disks would be still better, of course, but even harder to find.

Now for the Mac on which this formatting could be done. I presume this would be possible on one of the Macs that had 800k floppy drives originally, such as the earlier SE models, and, of course the Mac Plus. After the download of System 1 (zac4mac posted a french URL) you could use one of these to prepare a startup floppy for your ultra-classic 128k Mac.

This would be really an eye-in-eye encounter with computer history, getting ye old faithful to boot again...

Good luck,

Walter.