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| Treasure trove of floppies |
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2020-07-31 18:43:50
it was some sort of early networking protocol software, between Macs and PCs? Yeah, early file sharing, pre-AppleShare. Later versions were compatible with AFP too. Has DRM-related gubbins so you can't fire up two TOPS instances with the same serial number on the same network, hence interest in more copies of it.
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Posted by: Crutch on 2020-07-31 20:22:05
Interested in ClearLake Research libraries and such.
That's a terrific find - I've gotten a few similar caches, but mine have always turned out to be PC-based. You mean ToolLib and MathLib for MS BASIC? Weren’t those bundled with later versions? I think I have them.
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Posted by: karrots on 2020-08-01 04:53:13
For any of the official disks it would be best to take a flux image using something like https://applesaucefdc.com/. Then you can copy any potential copy protect as well. Also has a better chance of recovering an aged floppy. You can export other image types after creating the flux image.
In addition to any other site please upload to archive.org
https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_Disks
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Posted by: olePigeon on 2020-08-01 04:54:37
TOPS was a file sharing platform that came out before AppleShare, but ran on AppleTalk (at least on the Macintosh version.) However, you could run any protocol you wanted over the serial or phonenet cables, so it was technically platform agnostic. They released LocalTalk cards for PCs to be used with DOS and UNIX. FlashTalk was released later on which was an extra fast version of AppleTalk. It used special AppleTalk adapters with separate clocks that enabled for high speed phone net transfers beyond what AppleTalk was capable of at the time.
I used to have a few TOPS boxes for FlashTalk, but I never used them. Eventually gave them away. It was only marginally faster than traditional AppleTalk, and much slower than EtherNet.
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Posted by: TweedyF on 2020-08-01 07:28:59
@Crutch you're right on all counts. They're 400k MFS disks, but the main program disk seems to be missing. Until I get these up somewhere properly, here's the archive of disks 2 (Libraries) and 3 (Utilities), attached.
@LaPorta good call – I'll stick with Stuffit 1.5.1.
@cheesestraws I don't think any version of TOPS will install on my 128k (right?), and I can't get it to install on mini vMac, *and* the files don't have version numbers in the get info pane, so I don't actually know what version of TOPS it is. (The disks themselves are copies so there's no physical indication either.) Do you know any other way I can find out?
View attachment LSC2,3.sit
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Posted by: cheesestraws on 2020-08-01 07:33:59
Stick a disc image up here and someone can work it out I'm sure, possibly even me 🙂
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Posted by: Juror22 on 2020-08-01 09:08:35
You mean ToolLib and MathLib for MS BASIC? Weren’t those bundled with later versions? I think I have them. The two specific MS BASIC libraries that I am looking for are
ToolLib w/XFER
ArrayToStrLibrary
I am trying to run an MS QuickBasic (MAC) program and there are calls to both.
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Posted by: TweedyF on 2020-08-01 10:28:55
@cheesestraws Voilà!
View attachment TOPS.sit
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Posted by: TweedyF on 2020-08-01 13:07:29
I'm going to be away from the old Macs for about a month, so I thought I'd post what I've got so far for those interested. Archive.sit has mostly stuff that seems to be online already - though I think a few new sub-version numbers.
TOPS is in there as well. NumberMaze is cute and worth checking out - an educational math program. I haven't actually seen MacRISK online, although I feel like it must be? Gravitation is also neat.
Bonus.sit is full of things I found tonight; it has some fun curiosities, which I suspect some of you will know better what to make of than I am:
- ATTO Cache ci - a set of speed test utilities (Also in Archive.sit)
- BBEdit 2.2 beta 4
- MacDTS Sample Code - May 1990 Developer Technical Support sample code release
- MS BASIC 1.0 on a 400k MFS disk
- Net/Mac - a ham radio packet ip thingy
- Parallel Printer Utility - a Lightspeed C project for a utility GCC was developing
- TextPert - seems to be dev tools for Chinese language localization?
- TMON - a monitor and debugger from ICOM
- xfer - looks like an internal GCC SCSI development tool?
- XFS-Unsupported - 1991 sample code from Apple for external file systems along with an interesting letter explaining why developers shouldn't use it
This is probably the best of it - the rest of the disks look like mainly different iterations of the same GCC printer utilities and related things. (But who knows! I'll definitely check them all out.)
View attachment Archives.sit
View attachment Bonus.sit
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Posted by: Juror22 on 2020-08-09 04:26:48
Thanks TweedyF, for taking the time to curate and post these time capsules.
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Posted by: quorten on 2020-08-09 09:50:17
I'd estimate that to be about 380 floppy disks. Great find.
Any driver disks are definitely a plus. There's definitely some old hardware floating around that is unusable because the drivers are missing, like the Megascreen 3 video card in my Macintosh SE.
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