What is a "real vintage mac" ?

Compact Mac (Plus ? SE ? Classic ?)
Mac II ?
early PPC ?
G3 / G4 ?

For some even the floppy disk route is not going to be available to you. For some other options become available, ie. USB stick.

In all cases, install a version of Stuffit Expander on the Mac to unstuff the .sit files. Do not unzip them while in the Windows environment.

Hi NewMacGuy,

I have an LCIII, an SE/30 and a Mac IIfx most of which mostly work. They all need new floppy drives. The IIfx needs a new Nubus video card. At the moment, i'm using a zip-drive and sneakernet to ferry stuff across.

I have bought network cards for all of them and I'll be trying (eventually) to set up AppleShare on one of them and set up a network. I've also bought an 80-pin to 50-pin internal SCSI-converter and I hope to get a new SCA drive running inside one of the old macs. Once I figure out the pins and recall my old SCSI lore (it has been 15 years...), I reckon that I can install it on the PC, fire up Basilisk II, create a hundred 650 MB partitions and copy stuff across that way.

Another idea is to get your hands on Windows NT Server or Windows 2000 Server and install 'Services for Macintosh'. One should be able to network vintage macs with your PC and thence move across the larger files.

I'll let you know how I get on, if you are interested.

The floppy disk route may not work for you because PC floppy drives and Mac floppy drives are incompatible. (At least the 800k DSDD floppies are incompatible; I don't remember if the 1.4 MB floppy disks can be exchanged, maybe they can with PC File Exchange).

If your Mac has USB, you could try a USB flash drive, as long as it is formatted as FAT (not NTFS).

If your Mac has a CD-ROM drive, burn a CD with the .sit file on it. If it does not have CD-ROM, you may be able to hook up an external SCSI CD-ROM drive, as many early macs have external SCSI ports. The external enclosure should be SCSI terminated and you'll need a cable to connect the drive to the Mac.

If your Mac has an Ethernet network port, you could enable TCP/IP and transfer the files to the Mac that way. You may need to setup your PC as an FTP server, then use Netscape or some other old browser you have installed on the Mac if you don't have an FTP client program like Fetch already on the Mac.

Failing that, you could use a modem or direct serial connection to another computer and use a program like ZTerm to download the file over the serial port. That would require a serial cable and having ZTerm on the Mac already.

That still leaves the problem of unstuffing the .sit file, if you don't have Stuffit Expander installed. If you have a CD-ROM drive, you could download an .iso disk image formatted as a Mac Hybrid so that the Mac recognizes Stuffit Expander as an APPL (application) that is executable.

4x CD-ROm and a 10 Base-T Ethernet is an excellent start. So getting files to the Mac should not be a problem.

All we need is for someone from here to create an iso or Toast image with everything you need to get you going, ie. various Stuffit expanders, some FTP clients, etc. Knowing which Mac OS your PM7200 was running would help.

It could be that as you have a fairly powerful Mac, nearly all of the software suitable for it is in CD-ROM format already. So all you may need to do is use Stuffit Expander for Windows to unstuff the CD disc images on your PC and burn to disc.

Just as a note for me, and everyone else, any CD images we create should probably be HFS Standard, rather than HFS Extended.