This year I gave myself a Christmas present. My 3 year old Macintosh clone (a Radius machine) was not ageing gracefully; Heidi was getting serious about taking more library courses over the internet; and both Andrew and Colin were claiming more and more computer time for themselves. All in all, I felt a deep need for more hardware. So I bought an iMac.
The iMac is an impressive machine. It is a very powerful computer but, true to its Mac roots, it is also a model of simplicity to set-up and operate. So simple, in fact. that I delegated responsibility for setting it up to Andrew. He performed admirably and had no trouble at all.
There are two problems with having multiple computers in your house, one of which is unique to the iMac. First of all, we forget that our computers have stuff plugged into them ( printers, modem mostly) and unless you buy new stuff to plug into your new computer, you find that you can't do everything you want from either computer. The conventional solution to this is to do your work on one computer, save your work on a floppy disk, walk to the other computer, read the information from the floppy and then print or email or whatever from the second computer. This is a cumbersome procedure at the best of times but it just wouldn't work at all for my situation. You see, tne iMac doesn't have a floppy disk drive.
Apple believes, with some justification, that floppy disks are an obsolete technology, like eight-track tapes. In fact no manufacturer is currently making new floppies, and hardly any software is distributed on floppy anymore. Their function has been almost completely replaced by email and CD-ROMS. So the iMac comes with a built-in CD-ROM drive and a built-in modem for email. It also comes with a fully operational Ethernet port, which means that it knows how to talk to other computers, and to the stuff (modems and printers) we connect to them.
All of this is a very long winded explanation of why I decided to try to install a small network in my house. It would be very small: all I wanted to do was to connect my 2 computers, my old printer, and my cable modem together. I wanted to be able to store my files on either computer but be able to use them from the other one, I wanted to be able to surf the net and send email from either machine. and I wanted to be able to print even if the printer happened to be connected to the other computer. Sounds simple enough, right?
Wrong.
There are two ways to make a Mac network: the cheap way and the expensive way. I decided to try the cheap way first.
To create an inexpensive network you simply need a special cable, called a "cross-over" cable, and plug one end into each computer. At least, that's how it works in theory.In practice, it is a little more complicated. When a Mac is connected to a network, the files on its hard drive are made available to other computers on the network.When the Mac boots up, it checks to see it an active network connection exists, if it does, then file sharing is turned on, if not the computer assumes it is alone in the world and keeps its files to itself. When two computers are connected directly to each other there is a chicken and egg problem. No matter which machine boots first, it always sees a dead network connection because the other computer is turned off. After a short experiment I decided that it was going to be impossible to create a network on the cheap.
The more expensive option involves buying a network "hub", which is basically a little box with a bunch of green LED'S along one side and a bunch of jacks along the other. You have to run a cable from each computer to the hub, and because the hub has its own power supply each computer recognizes an active network as it boots up.
I bought a hub, and enough cable to connect my old Radius upstairs and the iMac downstairs to it.. Running the cables along the baseboards I wired everything together, turned everything on and, "Hey Presto" the network was up. Total cost for the hub and the cables: about $200.
I needed to spend another US$89 for some software which tricks the cable modem into thinking that it is only connected to one computer, even though it is plugged into the hub too. So, for a bit more than $300 I had my network.
Or so I thought.
Did I mention that I ran the network cable along the baseboards? Did I mention that the cables are electric blue? Did I mention that Heidi thought they looked ugly?
No problem, I thought, I will just buy a wall jack and run the cables through the wall into the unfinished part of the basement. This was my introduction to the wonderful world of cable colour code standards, or lack thereof.
I bought a wall jack, snipped the end off one of my electric blue cables. I thought that I would just match up the coloured strands in the network cable with the coloured terminals on the wall jack. My heart sank as I realized that the wires were completely different. There didn't seem to be any way to match them up.
I searched in vain on the internet for some Rosetta Stone which would let me figure out how to connect the orange, brown, blue and green ethernet twisted strands with the red, green, Yellow, blue, black, white, orange and brown terminals on the wall jack. Actually the wall jack didn't have red terminal, but had two orange terminals just, I became convinced, to make my life more difficult.
I even made a trip to the electronics stores on Queen Street west, including a fascinating visit to Active component Surplus, the store with the gorilla dummy outside. If you ever need a DOS 3.0 manual, still in its shrinkwrap, or some glass eyeballs, or a condom case, to go along with your switches, LED's and chips, that is definitely the place to go.
But nobody was able to help me figure out how to connect the wall plate.
Finally I just followed the wiring on the wall jack to the individual pins and wired up the network cable strands to what thought were the correct pins and finally I was able to reactivate my little network, just 2 weeks after I got the idea