From: robertp@ausom.oz.au (Robert Pascale)
Subject: Re: Reading Mac disks in PC?
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 09:31:02 GMT
Organization: AUSOM - The Apple Users Society of Melbourne

I hope to put people straight, and tell them the alternatives for MAC<->PC
transfer as everyone and his puppy seem to have a different opinion.

On A PC --> reading a Mac disk
------------------------------
You can read a 1.44Mb Mac disk in a 1.44Mb IBM drive with a program called
CLINK. (Pacific Micro MAC-IN-DOS it is sometimes called). It will unload
a resource fork and data fork at your option. It will not read 800K or 400K
disks. It is moderately slow.

On a MAC --> reading a PC disk
------------------------------
The best way nowadays is to by PC Exchange (just released), which is a
control panel item that will directly read PC disks when inserted into the
Mac drive. I believe it will only read 1.44Mb disks, but as I don't use 720K
PC disks, I never actually tried it out. It's advantage is that it will
create standard icons for MSDOS files on the finder, and will recognise some
formats (such as Excel or Word etc) directly. All the intermediate
conversion is done by the software. Unfortunately, Apple does not package
this with its system software and expects you to pay about $140 (from
memory) for it. Talk to your local Apple dealer for current prices.

The next best way is to use Apple File Exchange (AFE), which is on your
system disk(s). You just put the MSDOS disk in (again I have only tried
1.44Mb disks, and am not sure about 720K), and it will pop up a dialog box
asking you which files to convert to MAC format. It has some intelligence
and will ask if you want to convert between some of the more popular word
processing formats etc. It's biggest advantage is it's free. The
disadvantage is that you have to run the program each time you want to
convert something, rather than just dropping the icon onto the PC disk.

There is in addition the PC boards that you can plug into your mac, but that
it a pretty ridiculous thing to do if you just want to convert the software
onto a different disk format!

Either way conversion
---------------------
The other way you can get data between the machines is through a direct
serial link, but that isn't really what the original post was about, so I
won't say much. Needless to say, this is nice and simple (once you have the
cable and comms software), and is much better and faster for bulk transfers
(many megabytes).

If you have once off requests for such things, your local apple dealer may
ask a small charge for doing the conversions for you. 

At AUSOM, we have several sessions each year on our Open day meetings (first
Saturday of each month, Deakin University, Burwood, except January). Come
along and visit the club and see if you can learn something. There's plenty
to do.... by the way, it's from 12:30pm to 5:00pm

-- 
Robert Pascale, B.App.Sc, AACS, PCP | robertp%ausom.oz@sol.cc.deakin.oz.au
PO Box 8084          | Committee of Management, AUSOM   | Ph: +613 4789644
Northland Centre, VIC| Apple Users Society of Melbourne | Fax:+613 4704403
3072, Australia      | ---==>>Australia's Largest Apple User Group <<==---
Newsgroups: aus.computers.ibm-pc