5.03.2008

This is me, tearing my hair out...

Remember the other day, when I was going on and on about how easy my little AppleTalk experiment was? Yeah, well, that was then, and this is now.

How come an ancient Color Classic, circa 1993 and running an OS that generated its zeros and ones by banging small rocks together, fired up and chattered back and forth with my much more recent PowerBook 2400 without a hitch, but when my Twentieth Anniversary Mac, a nearly contemporaneous machine, was asked to do likewise I got bupkis? I've tried both the 2400 and the G3 WallStreet and the TAM refuses to divulge its existence to the network through either the modem or printer ports.

Work proceeds apace on figuring out just exactly why. I'm all ears if anyone has any ideas on where to look.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're straining the limitations of my memory here, but IIRC the GeoPorts never quite worked the way they should; there was quite a gulf between "works in theory" and "works in practice".

How are you networking? PhoneNet?

Tam said...

Trying to use the good ol' AppleTalk dongles, modem port to modem/printer port at the moment.

(TAM to WallStreet)

Anonymous said...

Hmm, what OS versions are the machines running?

Tam said...

9.2.2 on the WallStreet and 9.1 on the TAM.

Anonymous said...

Hmm, that's got me stumped. Possibly a bad port and/or adapter and/or cable?

B.S. philosopher said...

But wait... I thought Macs just "worked" :-P

Tam said...

...and they all do, except this one stubborn machine won't talk to the other ones and I'm not Mac-savvy enough to figure out why.

Like I'd tell overly smug shooters of Glocks or revolvers at my last job: "At the end of the day, it's just a machine and machines fail; it's what they do."

freddyboomboom said...

Make extra sure the terminators are on the AppleTalk dongles...

Those are vitally important.

Tam said...

Got that.

I had your old Duo 280c chattering away merrily with the WallStreet yesterday (I wrote my latest column on the Duo) and they talked just fine, too.

It's only the TAM so far that won't speak to other machines. Maybe I'm missing an extension or have one turned off that should be on?