Note: These Disk Copy 4.2 disk images* are stored inside early Stuffit 3 (SIT) archives, which can be extracted by Stuffit Expander 3.5 (and above) in System 6 (and above). You can download Stuffit Expander at MacFixer. In Mac OS X 10.7 and above, The Unarchiver can extract them for use in Mini vMac or via Floppy Emu.
If you are using Disk Copy to make floppy disks, don't expand the archives until they reach the machine you will use to make the disks. Avoid handling them on Windows, as it will strip the resource fork from the archive.
Minimum recommended OS for the Macintosh 128K and 512K.
System 1.1 is the first complete Mac Software release, coming less than four months after the Macintosh shipped with what can be thought of as a sort of public beta. See Andy Hertzfeld's Real Artists Ship. Recently (see here, for example), it has come to my attention that the original two-disk set containing Finder 1.0 (January 1984) is not available on the internet. I provide them now because clarity about these landmark disks is important for the history of macOS. My disk images (currently in a ZIP archive) were made from original disks carefully preserved, untouched in their original boxes by a software developer who did not need to use them. They are not recommended for practical use:
Recommended OS for the Macintosh 128K.
The System Update disk was sent to dealers, for distribution to Macintosh owners. MacWrite 4.5 and MacPaint 1.5 were the current versions for more than two years.
Recommended OS for the Macintosh 512K. Maximum OS for the 128K.
Recommended OS for the Macintosh 512Ke. Maximum OS for the 512K.
Troubleshooting:
On a Macintosh 512K with an external 800K floppy drive:
On a Macintosh 512K with a Hard Disk 20 hard drive:
For information about Macintosh hardware compatibility with System 6.0.x, see Apple Knowledge Base article TA33972: System Software: Version Matrix, System 6.0.x to 7.0.1. While it is possible to run up to System 6.0.8 on a Macintosh 512Ke, some applications may not function on a machine with only 512K of memory, or even 1 Mb.
There are three System 6 releases available for download on the old Apple Support Area server. As of May 2018, the index is not accessible, but the files are still there, just click on the direct links below. Another source for these same files is MacFixer.
Troubleshooting:
You can use Font/DA Mover (on the Utilities 2 disk) to reduce the size of the System file and free up space on a floppy disk:
You can also reduce the size of the System Folder. The System Folder on the System 6.0.3 System Tools disk is shown here:
You can format 800K (2DD: double-sided, double-density) disks as 400K (1DD: single-sided, double-density) disks with no problems. Note that you should use Double Density (DD) media. One reliable source for new disks is OldSoftware.com. You should not use High Density (HD) media. HD disks are not entirely stable when formatted as DD. If you must use HD media, then it should be a disk that has never been formatted. See here (p. 14) for details.
For System 6, you should use Disk Copy 4.2 [Read Me] [Download from Apple] to work with 400K/800K disks and images. This is ideal, since System 6 can read/write 400K disks, which normally use the Macintosh File System (MFS) format. 800K disks use a different format: the Hierarchical File System (HFS). System 6 is fluent in both formats. [It is possible to format 400K disks using HFS, but they can't be used as startup disks. See here.]
System 7 is not ideal, since it does not handle the MFS format properly. This is discussed in Apple Knowledge Base article TA47951: System 7.x: Limitations on Use of 400k Disks. Nevertheless, you can use Disk Copy 4.2 to work with 400K/800K disks and images with no problems. Disk Copy 6.3.3 [Download from Apple] works perfectly with 800K disks and images. It allows you to make compressed images and mount images on the Desktop.
Disk Copy 6.3.3 also handles NDIF "New Disk Image Format" disk images.
With Mac OS 7.6, Apple dropped support for writing to the MFS format. Mac OS 8 dropped MFS support altogether. However, any Macintosh with a built-in floppy drive can use Disk Copy 4.2 to make 400K/800K disks from images and Disk Copy 6.3.3 to make 800K disks from images, even in Mac OS 9. For more on this, see Sonic Purity.
Floppy Emu from Big Mess o' Wires uses a standard SD card to bridge the gulf between the current macOS and early Macintosh systems.
From Macintosh to macOS: Moving files and disk images in this direction is not a problem. macOS can read .dsk disk images (used by Floppy Emu). Just change the file extension from .dsk to .img and voila!
Note: Floppy Emu also supports Disk Copy .image files. You can read them on macOS by directly converting them to .dsk files (see above), or you can use Mini vMac to open a .image disk image and transfer its contents to a .dsk disk image (all within Mini vMac).
From macOS to Macintosh: Moving in this direction is more problematic. It depends on what you are doing. The simplest approach is to use vintage Mac hardware supported by Floppy Emu's HD20 hard disk emulation mode that can run System 7.5 comfortably, like the Macintosh Classic and Classic II, or Macintosh IIci and IIsi.
If you are moving legacy StuffIt archives and other common Macintosh programs and documents, another excellent approach is to create a System 7.5.3 virtual machine in macOS using Basilisk II. Other classic systems, like System 7.1.1 ("System 7 Pro") and Mac OS 8.1 (the last to support 68k processors), can be used, but installing them is not for beginners -- unlike the System 7.5.3 installation, there are no instructions. [We prefer the October 1991 (420DBFF3) Quadra 900 or March 1992 (3DC27823) Quadra 950 ROM -- the original Mac "Pro" towers!] Basilisk II takes advantage of the Unix foundation of macOS to employ a shared Unix networking folder as a conduit between the virtual machine and macOS.
Once you have System 7.5 up and running, use the shared Unix folder to install one essential utility:
You can also install StuffIt Expander v4.0 up to v5.5, or StuffIt Deluxe from v3.5 up to v5.5 (the last version to support 68k processors). System 7.1.1+ and 8 MB RAM is required to install StuffIt 5.x (Expander or Deluxe).
The BinHex (.hqx) and MacBinary (.bin) archive/transfer formats do not have resource forks, and thus are safe to move through Windows. StuffIt archives are another story. There are three types of legacy StuffIt archive formats:
.sit Type: SIT! Creator: SIT!.sit Type: SITD Creator: SIT!.sit Type: SIT5 Creator: SIT!To restore StuffIt 5 archives with missing or garbled resource forks, use ResEdit [PDF] [Download from Apple] to reset the file Type and Creator values to the above. The two older .sit formats are more problematic, but you can try to reset the file Type and Creator, in case that is all that is wrong.
* Special thanks to Sara Johnson not only for her advice on how to do this, but also for her help in revising these archives (May 2018).
