So MARCHintosh is now over and I am exhausted. Let me explain. Firstly, What is MARCHintosh and what’s with the name?
Very simply #MARCHintosh is a month (March) where a group of retrpcomputing enthusiasts work on projects based on 68K and PPC based Macintoshes and share those projects via social media with the hashtag #MARCHintosh.
One project that pricked my interest and then turned into a bit of an obsession was #GlobalTalk. GlobalTalk was be a coordinated effort by many individuals to set up a worldwide AppleTalk network using Apple’s Internet Router (AIR). For those of you that don’t know AppleTalk it was Apple’s networking standard before TCP/IP networks became a standard and the internet came along.
When I was in Apple Australia back in the late 90s we had a global AppleTalk network with well over 400 zones.
I won’t go into technical details here but there is a good summary of the whole project on @europlus’ site https://blog.europlus.zone/community/marchintosh-wrap-up-globaltalk-news/
I set up my SE/30 as a test case for a GlobalTalk server and it worked brilliantly. I then set up a Quadra 605 in my remote office. I was then able to pretty much connect anything that could handle AppleTalk networking back in the day to the network. I was able to connect an old power book via ethernet. An eMate and Apple IIgs via local talk and even a newton via Wi-Fi to global talk. I could growers other people’s servers, play networked games like Bolo and was even able to print to other people’s printers. The printing became a bit of a game as everyone was printing their own little calling cards to remote printers. My LocalTalk enabled ImageWriter II was the recipient of many of these calling cards.
Now that MARCHintosh is over I intend to keep my GlobalTalk node up. I even built a new router for my home office so I didn’t have to leave the SE/30 on all the time. It is a bit of a hacked solution but it works. I put an LC475 logicboard and a rebuilt PSU onto a nylon cutting board, added an old BlueSCSI v1 and an ethernet card but built a stand that allowed it to sit in my office silently while acting as my GlobalTalk node and Vintage Computer Garage server.
Overall it was a lot of fun, even if GlobalTalk doesn’t have any longevity I can still use my two routers to connect my home office and my remote office with full Timbuktu screen sharing between them. Happy days.
