Re: IIGS and IBM laptops...any hints?

[dmcclain@runet.edu (Dennis McClain-Furmanski)]

Ron Louie (ronlouie@u.washington.edu) wrote:
: 	With IBM used laptops and used parallel printers becoming 
: available, I'm thinking of buying that hardwared to complement my desktop 
: IIGS.  With Harmonie printer drivers, I figure, a printer could be shared.  
: Any hints on the possibilty of sharing files/3.5 disks, etc?  I'm a 
: devoted Appleworks Classic and AWGS 1.1 user.  Would a 386 laptop be 
: adequate (for small business applications, word processing and 
: spreadsheets?)

I have a 386 and IIgs networked on my desk. They share a printer (OKI 
OL400e LED printer -- has both parallal and serial in and switches itself).
The machine also share a modem via a switchbox and are wired together via 
null modem. I use AW 3.0 and WordPerfect. Converting files to ASCII and 
shipping them has become second nature. A small collection of other 
simple utils helps. A CArriage Return stripper for instance. No direct 
sharing of disks, but if you wire them together, there's no need. 

Same advice usually given applies. Figure out what you want to do (what 
software) and get the machine that'll run it. What I can't do on these 
two I can do on the Linux sharing the box with my 386.

I'm about to get a 386 portable, and will do much the same thing with it. 
My processes are already debugged by doing it with the desktop.

You might also consider getting a PC/Transporter and a spare 3.5" drive 
to go with it. If all you need is a 286 to do what you need, it's real 
convenient having it all in one box. That's all I ran until I needed to 
run Matlab. You'd probably want to devote 20 or 30 MB of hard drive space 
to the PC/T though.