SneakerNet, with a pass-thru a Mac that handles floppies or Zips

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Nope. That won't be happening either.

Since Snow Leopard only reads HFS, there will be no writing to disks, external 1.44MB floppy, ZIP or otherwise for use with any Mac which cannot run System 8.1. That rules out all the Compacts (with the possible exception of the 8.1 hack for the SE/30 and possibly CC/CC II & Classic II), which is where this topic is posted.

So no, Apple has effectively eliminated Snow Leopard as a practical platform from which to maintain a vintage Compact Mac. A suitable emulator like Mini vMac should allow disk images to be manipulated and then read directly into ZTerm for serial modem transfer, however, there is no way to write those files to a physical HFS disk in order to use the "SneakerNet" (that is sooooo 1984). In fact those files under Mini vMac will already have to exist on HFS images in order to even get them into Mini vMac (which does not yet support OS 8.1). In the interim, SheepShaver can be used (the latest 2006 build still mostly works under SL) to read HFS+ disks and transfer them to HFS. However, anything that can run 8.1 will also not be able to work with MFS disks, so keep Mini vMac handy (much more stable under SL anyway).

FTP works from the Mac Plus forward, thought not as elegant as AFP. Just out of curiosity, we know for sure they have dropped support for AFP 2.x and earlier? I know AFP 3.0 corresponds with OS X, but it had roots in OS 8 & 9, right? So did they essentially remove AFP support prior to the introduction of HFS+ with 8.1? If so there's an interesting parallel with dropping AFP on any System which did not support HFS (i.e. 128K/512K & MFS). Perhaps AFP 3.0 requires HFS+ files structures only to be optimized?

Here's an interesting articleabout losing legacy support under SL.

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