Three years ago Dayna Communications stirred up debate in the Macintosh community with MacCharlie, a device that lets the Mac emulate an IBM PC. At the time a lot of Mac fanatics angrily denounced the device, asking who would want to transform a clean and pure Mac into a down and dirty DOS machine. Obviously lots of folks, since Dayna is now offering an improved method of file sharing, the DaynaFile.
Instead of the impersonation routine of MacCharlie, the DaynaFile lets the Mac read a document directly off of a DOS disk. You can then use the data in your favorite Mac application. Actually, the DaynaFile was preceded by Dayna's FT100, a hardware-based file transfer system. But the DaynaFile shares data between the IBM and Mac environments with a lot more flexibility and continuity.
DaynaFile can contain drives for either the 360K (and 1.2 MB) 5 1/4-inch format or for 720K (and 1.44 MB) 3 1/2-inch disks. You can have up to two drives in a DaynaFile and can freely mix and match the formats to meet your needs. It comes with its own power supply and has two SCSI ports so you can daisy chain the DaynaFile to a hard disk. A switch on the back changes the ID address number to prevent conflicts with other SCSI devices. To set up the DaynaFile, just plug in the cables and copy the Device Driver icon into your System folder Then restart your computer, flipping the drive off and on too. When everything stops whirring you'll notice a new icon on the desktop: a 5 1/4-inch "fat" disk. Clicking on the disk opens a window that reveals the files. From here on in, all of your file management behaves just like the Mac should. MS-DOS files are represented as documents and any contained in IBM’s subdirectory structure are shown as being in folders.
Copying MS-DOS files to a Macintosh disk or vice versa is as simple as dragging the document file into your hard disk window. But to use the DOS data, it will have to be in a form understandable by your Mac application — ASCII text, for example. The problem with ASCII, however, is that all of your formatting (margins, tabs, bold text, etc.) goes out the window. If your Mac application can't read any of the DOS commands, it leaves a box in its place. Some software developers are adding options to save those format features when the data is transported to another environment. Word 3.0, for example, uses a DCA conversion utility to read the format of the IBM version of WordPerfect files.
If you don't have compatible programs, Dayna offers a $95 solution in the form of translation software. The software is actually a watered-down version of Data Viz's MacLink Plus, another filesharing alternative that uses a cable to link an IBM PC with a Mac... . Dayna has licensed MacLink Plus to be used in its local mode only. This means you can translate formatting codes between popuIar programs — Word Star to MacWrite, for example — but only when the MS-DOS document already appears on the Macintosh desktop. You can't get the cable and use the version of MacLink Plus that Dayna sells for a direct link with an IBM PC.
The DaynaFile isn't without pitfalls, but its makers have been good about documenting potential hazards. You're bound to run into problems like MS-DOS disks that are too full or write-protected disks. In both cases the problem is with the Macintosh Finder: it needs room to create a desktop for the disk when it is first read by the DaynaFile. So there’s either not enough memory on the disk or it can't write to it.
When you’re not accessing MS-DOS files on the DaynaFile, you can use it as a Macintosh external drive. As such it is a little pokey, but still usable. You can even use most of the normal desktop commands: Get Info, New Folder, Duplicate. It’s almost easy to forget that you’re working with data generated on an IBM machine. But there are times when interfacing with the DaynaFile isn't very clean. To eject a disk you have to first drag the icon into the trash (or dim it by using Control-E), then pop the disk manually. If you don’t, the Mac asks for the disk back and won’t go on until you do so. Also you can't open a DOS file directly from the desktop by double-clicking on its icon; you have to do it from within a Macintosh program.
There are certainly other solutions to file-sharing, but those usually require complex cabling schemes and networks. For sheer portability and ease of use, the DaynaFile is the best I’ve seen.
Templin, Ben. (January 1988). DaynaFile. MacUser. (pg. 94).
Dayna Communications
System
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2020-09-14 / 
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DaynaFile.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
