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I had a desperate phone call from ny University freshman daughter this week. She had to be at class in half an hour, needed some notes she had worked on late the night before, and her PowerBook 1400 was using to print to her StyleWriter II printer. The printer usually works fine with her PowerBook 5300, so I suggested just copying the file to a floppy disk, transferring it to the 5300, and printing from there.

No go. She had already tried that, and the floppy drive in the old 5300 was in one of its moods and not accepting visitors. It would recognize any of the floppy disks she had on hand. The 5300 isn’t set up for Ethernet, so an online file transfer wasn’t possible either.

As a last-ditch workaround, I thought of a method I hadn’t used in years -- a quick and dirty AppleTalk/LocalTalk network using a serial printer cable for the hardware connection. I used to do that to transfer files between my Mac Plus and my LC 520. Okay; plumb the memory banks for how to set it up.

It’s really pretty simple. Plug one end of the a serial printer cable into a printer or modem port (or in this case the printer/modem ports on the two PowerBooks) on each computer respectively. Strictly speaking, you should shut down the machines while doing this, but we didn’t.

Now open the AppleTalk control panels on both computers (on older versions of the Mac OS, you need to do this in the Network control panel); turn AppleTalk on, and make sure that the appropriate port is selected in the “Connect Via” pull down menu. Close the AppleTalk control panel window and save any configuration changes.

Now open the File Sharing control panel on one of the computers, Note the user name and password entry in the upper field (I just delete the password for this sort of network - - it’s not necessary anDecember getting rid of it eliminates some hassle), and click the Start button in the middle field to turn File Sharing on. Start-up may take a minute or two

When File Sharinghis on, go to the other computer and open the Chooser. Click on the AppleShare by icon in the left hand field, and the name of your second computer with File Sharing activated should appear in the right-hand field as a server. Double click on the server name, and a dialog box will appear asking you to enter your user name and, if necessary, password. Type in the name that was entered in the File Sharing control panel on the other computer, paying attention to syntax, and the password if you didn’t delete it. Click the “Connect” button.

Yet another dialog will appear showing a list of volumes on the other computer, or just the hard drive folder name if you have only one partition and no other discs connected. Highlight whatever volume or volumes you want to access, and double click or press the OK button.

The volume icon(s) of the other computer should now appear on the desktop of this computer, allowing you to access files, drag files back and forth between the computers, and so on. This sort of networking is very slow compared with Ethernet, but it’s a lot better than no network at all in a pinch.

My daughter was able to successfully copy the file, and to print from 5300, although she discovered that she had to disable the AppleTalk extension in Extensions Manager and reboot before she could get the printer port to open. But that’s another movie.

Charles W. Moore

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