101–110 of 272 posts
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Thanks for mentioning {X,Y,Z}modem. I think folks forget that it still has modern uses.
I still use it regularly in 2024 to load data onto embedded devices running U-Boot. It saves me a network cable if one is not otherwise required.
Does it have a working C compiler? May have tried hacking together a data-over-audio app. Or quickly steam a bunch of qr codes.
> I try a bunch of different OCR programs, but can't find any that can transcribe the document with 100% accuracy. They often confuse certain letters or numbers (like 0 and C, 9 and 4, 0 and D). Sometimes they omit characters, sometimes they introduce new ones. I try different font sizes and different fonts, but it doesn't matter. I decided to OCR a hex dump from an old computer magazine a while back and fixed this p…
> I try a bunch of different OCR programs, but can't find any that can transcribe the document with 100% accuracy. They often confuse certain letters or numbers (like 0 and C, 9 and 4, 0 and D). Sometimes they omit characters, sometimes they introduce new ones. I try different font sizes and different fonts, but it doesn't matter. I decided to OCR a hex dump from an old computer magazine a while back and fixed this p…
That could become an automated improvement as well... although it was probably published in some paper 40 years ago and I just don't know the name of it. Basically a second-pass where you look for outliers in each character-group, reassign them to another group, and keep the change if it improves similarity-scores the character groups involved. Then iterate a bit until nothing seems to be improving. For example, one…
Still would risk some weirdness, but would help a bit I'd hope.
I wonder if it would be worth running some kind of language analysis or spelling/Grammer check to verify the scan too. At least for text, you'd need another solution for number tables.
Very creative and interesting ie 'use whatever tools/knowledge you have' but: > The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. This is literally never an issue as old connectors are easily obtainable (in particular 'in this day and age'). > Adapting it didn't seem straightforward, and we weren't confident the old file system (HFS) would be easy to read from a modern system. Simple search pulled this up.…
Author here. Admittedly I didn't explore this avenue very deeply. I was more focused on accomplishing this with parts I had on hand. A quick search yielded this result, which does confirm it's absolutely possible to adapt the drive: https://vintagemacmuseum.com/reading-powerbook-2-5-scsi-hard... (My way might be more fun. Ha.)
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It's highly unlikely any terminal software would be installed on an old Mac, even if it had a modem. (Although I don't know about Clarisworks.) It was counter to the whole mentality. There was a bootstrapping problem where you needed to get the software which allowed you to download the software, and even the common MacBinary/Stuffit/etc programs did not come with the system.
ClarisWorks had a "communications" module which is effectively a serial terminal, and which supported sending and receiving files. I'm not sure if it internally supported MacBinary, but it'd at least be enough to get files off the system.
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You can indeed use xmodem or zmodem, and use a macbinary encoding to transfer any file you want in either direction. Does require you to have something that can receive over serial on the PowerBook. ClarisWorks could definitely do it, but office probably has exactly the same 'receive document' feature. Alternatively, you can use the serial port to 'print' to, and just capture the serial output. It's essentially just…
It's highly unlikely any terminal software would be installed on an old Mac, even if it had a modem. (Although I don't know about Clarisworks.) It was counter to the whole mentality. There was a bootstrapping problem where you needed to get the software which allowed you to download the software, and even the common MacBinary/Stuffit/etc programs did not come with the system.
Because serial ports (and modems) were pretty much the default thing to use (besides LocalTalk and AppleTalk) the desktop software usually supported that out of the box, no terminal required. This is also why Fax support was built in, because even then, any other type of peer connectivity wasn't really big enough. And around that same time, ClarisWorks was also really common on Macs.
Now, we don't know for sure that the author also had ClarisWorks, but we don't really know much about what was available in general (except the games, the sound files and the fax). But in general serial file transfers, modem and serial based methods were pretty 'normal' to have.