Simon Williams <ludditetech@mac.com> wrote:

> Say I have a //e with a hard-drive (I don't yet, but bear with me) and
> another that has not got a hard-drive... how can the have-not machine
> access the hard-drive on the well-endowed machine?

Not easily.  There are old Apple II networking systems like Nestar, but
they require an interface card for each computer, and Nestar in
particular requires a dedicated file server with a special (and
physically enormous) hard drive or 8" floppy drive.

There may be more recent networking systems which allow a more
convenient server.

One example would be getting an Apple II Workstation Card for each
machine, an old Mac to act as the server, a copy of AppleShare 2.0 or
3.0 for the Mac, and set up an AppleTalk (LocalTalk) network between
them.  The Mac acts as a server and each Apple II can boot from the
server (or from a local drive).

Any such networking scheme will be significantly slower than a hard
drive connected directly to the machine.  (LocalTalk is a little slower
than a 3.5" floppy, or somewhat faster than a 5.25" drive.)

> Is it possible to have two computers physically sharing the drive
> (will probably be a Focus card) via some sort of 'Y' adapter?

Not with a Focus.

One way you can do this is to use one particular brand of third-party
SCSI card (CMS?), which supports hard partitioning of a SCSI hard drive.
This allows you to set up independent partitions for each of two
computers (each computer must have one of these SCSI cards).  You can
also set up a shared partition, but it is only safe to write to it from
one computer at a time (ideally, one computer should have write access
and the other one should only have read access).

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz