Re: Old non-SCSI Mac hard drive on IIc?

[david@wraith.cs.uow.edu.au (David E A Wilson)]

nathan@parka.winternet.com (Nathan Mates) writes:
>In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.960710160259.27403C-100000@moose>,
>Paul Schultz  <pschultz@med.wayne.edu> wrote:
>>Can the old Mac external hard drive which plugged into
>>the pre-SCSI Mac disk port work on a IIc? Does the Mac
>>use the same "SmartPort" commands?

>   I believe the first Mac HDs used a parallel port for 2-way
>communications (like the ProFile, and most external PC drives... how
>the computer world changes so much and never changes), so those didn't
>support SmartPort stuff.

The first Apple Hard Drive for the Macintosh was the Apple HD20 (not the
Apple HD20SC which was the first SCSI hard drive). The HD20 plugged into
the floppy disk port of the Mac 128/512. An external floppy drive could
be daisy chained off the rear of the HD20.

No Macintosh devices are SmartPort to my knowledge (on the Apple II the only
Apple SmartPort product is the UniDisk 3.5 [this is from the hardware point
of view] - all other devices just share the same software interface [also
known as SmartPort somewhat confusingly] such as SCSI cards, the Slinky RAM
card and Apple 3.5 drives which use the IWM but are not SmartPort devices on
the SmartPort bus).

As the Mac 800k and 400k drives do not work on a //gs disk port I doubt very
much if the HD20 could be made to function (but I could be wrong :-)).
-- 
David Wilson	Dept CompSci Uni Wollongong Australia	david@cs.uow.edu.au