Modern floppy drives are cheap working at 1.44mb, and the tracks wont align. Mine has a 800kb floppy drive, so results of writing floppies from a modern PC usually end with it not reading them. You may be able to use a floppy, but you may hit issues depending on your model of SE. I would suggest a SCSI2SD adapter for this initial transfer. I transferred the whole “mac” folder from Colombia’s FTP server onto my Mac SE. Get and get it onto your Mac SE, through some means. > set speed 57600 # Or whatever the speed has to be > set carrier-watch off # Assume there is no carrier signal

Please note wherever you start kermit, will be the home folder for file transfers, I suggest making a folder somewhere that you will drop files to transfer. Once that is installed search for your serial device under /dev/, mine is /dev/tty.usbserial1420. Using homebrew on the Mac, you can install “c-kermit”. To start the connection, I will be using a modern Mac as the server (a modern Mac being a 2012 Macbook Air), and a USB Serial cable to connect to the Mac SE as client. RS-232 to mini DIN 8 cable ( I used this one).Serial Adapter for the modern computer if your system doesnt have one on it.Get ready to experience what dialup was like all over again. Kermit is not fast, being serial and the Mac can’t support anything over 57600 baud but it offers compatibility with almost every OS at this point. hosts all the files, for archival purposes I also uploaded a clone of that folder to. While they have since transferred it to be an open source project, the original project files are still on their FTP server, and this offers everything from DOS to Mac to C64 binaries. The project was run by Colombia University for many years. I ended up using the Kermit protocol, the same protocol used to transfer software to the Compaq Portable II. The Mac does not come with a lot of software to help in this endeavor, which made me use the SCSI2SD adapter to load the initial setup on, then I could use the software to transfer after that. I then turned to the serial ports available in the back of the machine.

One of the methods I looked at was an ethernet LAN adapter for the Mac SE the issue I saw was some of them were expensive and a lot of them required more RAM than the 1MB my SE had. After reading a lot of different pages, and hitting different dead ends, or methods that involved a lot of hardware, time, or monetary investment I found an old reliable way to transfer files. The Mac journey continues with me searching for a way to transfer files from my modern PC/Mac onto the old Macintosh SE I recently was restoring a way without constantly removing the SD card from the SCSI2SD adapter and mounting it in an emulator.

Classic ftp for mac serial