As part of #MARCHintosh 2025 (and also after a nudge from @europlus to reduce my Zone range numbers on #globaltalk) I decided to try and resurrect my Work Group Server (WGS) 6150 and set it up as an AppleShare file server and Apple Internet Router (AIR) node for GlobalTalk.
The data sheet for the 6150 says that it shipped with “System 7”. It actually shipped with system 7.1.2 for PowerPC (PPC) along with the first PPC version of AppleShare being AppleShare 4.0.2. AIR also works on System 7.1 for 68K Macs so all seemed in order to give it a go.
I proceeded to install the system and AppleShare and it all seemed to work fine. There was a little hiccup with the serial number for AppleShare 4.02 as all online sources of the serial number for 4.02 are incorrect. All other AppleShare version serial numbers had a V instead of a U in a particular part of the string. Once I substituted a V for the U it installed fine. Clearly this was a typo by the original pirate back in the day.
Now that I had the server component working it was time for AIR. I was a little concerned that a piece of software as sensitive as AIR might not handle running as 68K code on PPC. The installation went fine apart from the installer complaining that it needed to replace the newer version of Shared Library Manager with an older version (It installed v1.0 over the top of v1.1.2).
All good so far, however upon restart the system crashed with an “illegal instruction” error. Thinking it was probably the Shared Library Manager version I replace the older one with the newer one. Upon restart it crashed again this time with a “bus error”. No matter what I tried I could not get AIR 3.01 working on the WGS. I am assuming that it is a 68K-PPC issue. This one was my first fail for MARCHintosh 2025. Onto the second fail…..
As a stretch goal, I wanted to connect my Apple IIGS to AppleShare. Given the first fail with AIR I started with a fresh System 7.1.2 sans AIR. The last version of AppleShare to support the Apple II was Apple share 3.03. Once again it will run on a maximum of system 7.1 so I figured it might work . I installed AppleShare 3.0 on the new system and all seem to be working. However when I rebooted the whole system hung whilst loading extensions, no error messages nothing. At least AIR told me it knew what the error was even if I didn’t know what it meant. I tried the installs again to make sure I hadn’t missed anything and got the same result. Once again I am assuming AppleShare 3 doesn’t want to work on a PPC.
