Letter
Copyright (c) 1995 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
In my rearranging I found this letter from September 1991 tucked away. It tells of how easy it was for one member to connect a hard drive to their machine. For those who are not currently using a hard drive it may be the inspiration that you need to discard your floppies forever.
Dear Andrew,
I've been pondering the idea of a hard drive for my Apple IIGS for a couple of years, tempted by the articles in A2-Central and A+. Of course the only thing that stopped me from rushing out was my money supply, but recently a forgotten insurance policy matured and I've had a wonderful time.
The worst temptation was Darrall Cutting's article "Mass Storage" (June 91, p.19) and I succumbed. Wanting value for money I studied the Trading Post assiduously looking for someone local and I found Chris Burke of Securicom (5297510). He assembled a 105 meg drive with terminating resistors in place at a very reasonable price. I bought a Hi Speed SCSI card from Mountain Computers in Hurstville and then spent an anxious week looking at my packages and wondering if I had been an idiot, no, an extravagant idiot.
Having practically memorised (?mesmerised) Darrall's article I sat down very calmly and did as it said. My only problem was putting the SCSI card in slot 7, as it was far too close to the chips on my memory card so I put it in slot 6.
I installed the SCSI drivers on my system disk copy and away I went. The only snag I struck was lack of response from the hard drive at first (Gulp!) so I changed the setup to YOUR CARD.
I do not seem to be able to boot into the Finder but I get a good version of Prodos and all the GS type files on the first partition can be run from a system disk in Slot 5,drive 1. To solve the problem of my 5 1/4" drives which I need to use to prepare teaching disks I turned the hard drive off with its power switch, changed the Control Panel to Disk Port and away I went, both old and new systems available. I'll wait to get the promised System 6 disks for the IIGS and try again.
Has anyone got any suggestions to share through your columns? I would like to have a giant collection of CDA's to play with.
I was interested to see that the second 3.5" drive became slot 2, drive 1. It does not seem very logical.
I'm thinking about Hypercard GS on partition 3, partition 2 has got my best friend, Appleworks 3.0 and UltraMacros and soon Multiscribe will join them. Appleworks GS loads and runs like a dream but its printing to a laser printer is a disappointment (I am using an ICE cable)
A bit more of my windfall has gone into ordering ProSel because I think the Finder is a pain. I have to change to 'View by name' to see all the files in a directory without having to yank windows to and fro. The SNEEZE program from A2-Central disks is nifty too.
So thanks for printing a very practical article.
A. Allen

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