Installation

The Drive 2.4 and Rapport both came in large boxes with plenty of foam padding and electrostatic protection bags. I was a bit surprised to receive such a large box containing the two of them, but the volleyball games at the shipping warehouse would be hard put to damage either piece. A 1.4 MB blank disk (nice touch!) and an 800K floppy disk containing the software ships in the Rapport box, and both boxes contain the same manual. The Drive 2.4 box also includes a shrink-wrapped copy of Fifth Generation’s FastBack II backup program, which I’m not going to get to reviewing. Rapport can work alone to provide some extra features to the internal drive or to an external Apple drive (more on this later), which is why Kennect packages and ships the two items separately.

The floppy disk contains a System Folder, the Rapport INIT, Apple File Exchange, and a Read Me file that gives a version history for the INIT. Installation was simple and needed no instructions. I connected the Drive 2.4’s cable to the Rapport, attached the Rapport to my Mac’s floppy port, dropped the Rapport INIT in the System Folder, and rebooted. Actually, that’s not entirely true, because I wanted to see if anything would happen with the Rapport and Drive 2.4 connected without the INIT installed. Nothing did.

The installation procedure couldn’t have been much easier, although the manual says that some Macs are lower to the ground than others. For those Macs, Kennect includes a new set of rubber feet to raise the Mac slightly so that the Rapport unit isn’t running into the desk surface. This wasn’t a problem for me, since the Mac sits on my hard drive. Still, it’s something to keep in mind when installing Rapport.