Home » forums » Discussion » Apple II

Fired up my Old Apple //e

Submitted by TechieJustin on December 15, 2007 - 4:18am. Apple II

That's pretty much it. Apple //e bought when I was 5 used until the Duo Dick started failing around 1992. Then we crossed over to a POS Tandy machine and the //e was stored in the basement.
Anyway... I'm looking to find a hard drive for it. I checked out ebay but I'm not sure what to get. I'm guessing I need a SCSI card, but which one?
I'm an IT tech for 11 years but this is a bit beyond my reach!

Justin

» login or register to post comments | previous forum topic | next forum topic

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

You want a CFFA. Much better

Submitted by resman on December 15, 2007 - 5:10am.

You want a CFFA. Much better than a hard disk. Look here for details:

http://dreher.net/?s=projects/CFforAppleII&c=projects/CFforAppleII/main.php

Look in to ADTPro for transferring disk images:

http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/

And CiderPress for tying it all together:

http://ciderpress.sourceforge.net//index.htm

Dave...

»
login or register to post comments

Re: You want a CFFA. Much better

Submitted by TechieJustin on December 15, 2007 - 5:19am.
resman wrote:
You want a CFFA. Much better than a hard disk. Look here for details:

http://dreher.net/?s=projects/CFforAppleII&c=projects/CFforAppleII/main.php

Look in to ADTPro for transferring disk images:

http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/

And CiderPress for tying it all together:

http://ciderpress.sourceforge.net//index.htm

Dave...

Sounds interesting, but I would like th keep the whole setup as vintage as possible.
I don't want anything modern in there.

»
login or register to post comments
DTFlowers's picture

Vintage?

Submitted by DTFlowers on December 15, 2007 - 7:33am.

Vintage is great, but finding old small SCSI drives may be a problem. You can use the SCSI Zip drives on the apples, either the 100MB or the 250MB. I have used a Zip250, but they would still be considered modern IMHO. Personally I'd prefer CFFA for reliability and use the SCSI only for the vintage aspect. There are also the old Syquest drives out there, I think they had 50MB ~5in, and 105MB & 270MB in ~3.5in. You can find some old non-removable drives on the refurbished market.

If you can get a SCSI card and can't find a drive, contact me my wife would love for me to part with some of my goods. I have a few SCSI drives 40MB/52MB/80MB and a couple of others including the Syquest removable drives both the 105MB & 270MB. Mainly I keep the drives for vintage reasons myself, but most have not been used in over 5 years.

I see no reason why the older drives would not still work so long as they are mechanically sound. Wherever you get the SCSI drives from I would do a low level format on them before using them. That will put a new magnetic image on the drive and map out the bad sectors. I'm not sure how to go about that on the ZIP drives though.

»
login or register to post comments

Re: Vintage?

Submitted by TechieJustin on December 15, 2007 - 6:00pm.
DTFlowers wrote:
Vintage is great, but finding old small SCSI drives may be a problem. You can use the SCSI Zip drives on the apples, either the 100MB or the 250MB. I have used a Zip250, but they would still be considered modern IMHO. Personally I'd prefer CFFA for reliability and use the SCSI only for the vintage aspect. There are also the old Syquest drives out there, I think they had 50MB ~5in, and 105MB & 270MB in ~3.5in. You can find some old non-removable drives on the refurbished market.

If you can get a SCSI card and can't find a drive, contact me my wife would love for me to part with some of my goods. I have a few SCSI drives 40MB/52MB/80MB and a couple of others including the Syquest removable drives both the 105MB & 270MB. Mainly I keep the drives for vintage reasons myself, but most have not been used in over 5 years.

I see no reason why the older drives would not still work so long as they are mechanically sound. Wherever you get the SCSI drives from I would do a low level format on them before using them. That will put a new magnetic image on the drive and map out the bad sectors. I'm not sure how to go about that on the ZIP drives though.

I will probably get a CFFA along with a hard drive to keep it vintage.
As for the hard drive, weren't there special Apple external hard drives? I remember rading about Tom Clance and how he wrote The Hunt For Red Octobner on his Apple 2 with a "Massive" 80 meg hard drive.
I googled and found nothing to that effect.
So yes, I'll go with the CFFA and I emailed the guy in the previous link.
Here she is by the way!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIBJ69txVlI

»
login or register to post comments

Re: Vintage?

Submitted by TechieJustin on December 15, 2007 - 6:01pm.
DTFlowers wrote:
Vintage is great, but finding old small SCSI drives may be a problem. You can use the SCSI Zip drives on the apples, either the 100MB or the 250MB. I have used a Zip250, but they would still be considered modern IMHO. Personally I'd prefer CFFA for reliability and use the SCSI only for the vintage aspect. There are also the old Syquest drives out there, I think they had 50MB ~5in, and 105MB & 270MB in ~3.5in. You can find some old non-removable drives on the refurbished market.

If you can get a SCSI card and can't find a drive, contact me my wife would love for me to part with some of my goods. I have a few SCSI drives 40MB/52MB/80MB and a couple of others including the Syquest removable drives both the 105MB & 270MB. Mainly I keep the drives for vintage reasons myself, but most have not been used in over 5 years.

I see no reason why the older drives would not still work so long as they are mechanically sound. Wherever you get the SCSI drives from I would do a low level format on them before using them. That will put a new magnetic image on the drive and map out the bad sectors. I'm not sure how to go about that on the ZIP drives though.

I will probably get a CFFA along with a hard drive to keep it vintage.
As for the hard drive, weren't there special Apple external hard drives? I remember rading about Tom Clance and how he wrote The Hunt For Red Octobner on his Apple 2 with a "Massive" 80 meg hard drive.
I googled and found nothing to that effect.
So yes, I'll go with the CFFA and I emailed the guy in the previous link.
Here she is by the way!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIBJ69txVlI

»
login or register to post comments

I see you have the Apple RGB

Submitted by resman on December 15, 2007 - 9:10pm.

I see you have the Apple RGB monitor. Pretty scarce nowadays and looks good. I have a very similar setup with a Profile and Apple Graphics Tablet as well as DuoDisk and Apple RGB monitor. I bet your monitor looks better than mine. I have the Profile as a period piece, but actually use a CFFA. The Profile's life may not last much longer - it makes a sad noise every once in awhile. The CFFA is also faster.

Dave...

»
login or register to post comments
DTFlowers's picture

RE: Vintage?

Submitted by DTFlowers on December 15, 2007 - 11:49pm.

My recollection is that Apple had a 5MB/10MB Profile SCSI drives, granted that was a long time ago. I don't recall Apple having an 80MB, however there was one offered by Applied Engineering (Vulcan) that was 80MB as I recall, I think it replaced the power supply. My mom bought an external 60MB CMS drive for her Apple //e at the cost of about a grand when they were new. The drive still works when a little mechanical agitation is applied (ie Hammer). Once the platters are up and spinning it works well. The original drives were 5.25 other than that one all mine are of the 3.5in variety. I have 2 160MB untested 160MB SCSI drives that came from a laptop or something, they are about 3in wide and 0.5in tall. Not sure where to find a connector for it though. What is interesting on the CMS drive is that the partitions are set by jumpers on the controller card not through software. I don't know if that was true of any other SCSI drives used with the Apple //e.

»
login or register to post comments

When I had friends over who h

Submitted by TechieJustin on December 17, 2007 - 2:17am.

When I had friends over who had various IBM machines of the period they were amazed that nUmber one it was color and number two the color was pretty decent (for the period).
I ordered a CFFA card interfact so that should arrive in a week or two.

»
login or register to post comments

Re: RE: Vintage?

Submitted by TechieJustin on December 17, 2007 - 2:19am.
DTFlowers wrote:
My recollection is that Apple had a 5MB/10MB Profile SCSI drives, granted that was a long time ago. I don't recall Apple having an 80MB, however there was one offered by Applied Engineering (Vulcan) that was 80MB as I recall, I think it replaced the power supply. My mom bought an external 60MB CMS drive for her Apple //e at the cost of about a grand when they were new. The drive still works when a little mechanical agitation is applied (ie Hammer). Once the platters are up and spinning it works well. The original drives were 5.25 other than that one all mine are of the 3.5in variety. I have 2 160MB untested 160MB SCSI drives that came from a laptop or something, they are about 3in wide and 0.5in tall. Not sure where to find a connector for it though. What is interesting on the CMS drive is that the partitions are set by jumpers on the controller card not through software. I don't know if that was true of any other SCSI drives used with the Apple //e.

Interesting. I'm obviously wrong wbout the 80MB part, btu I do know Tom Clancy uses Apple products.

»
login or register to post comments