111–120 of 272 posts
Arn't there a serial (COM) port available on that laptop ? It was kind of ubiquitous at those days. This website [1] says there were two of them. Solving the probem with Zmodem would be trivial. The software (terminal) is already there, it seems. 1. https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_duo/specs/mac_p...
Apple used 8-pin mini DIN connectors for serial. The author might not have had the right cable.
Seems far easier to figure out the hard drive connector and find software that can read the filesystem.
Arn't there a serial (COM) port available on that laptop ? It was kind of ubiquitous at those days. This website [1] says there were two of them. Solving the probem with Zmodem would be trivial. The software (terminal) is already there, it seems. 1. https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_duo/specs/mac_p...
I was actually expecting the author to take photos of the old laptop's screen and OCR those. This was far more entertaining. I do wonder though... perhaps it would have been faster to have the larger fonts and let the transfer take 24 minutes. It probably took longer than 24 minutes to write the updated OCR software. But, where's the fun in that?
Wow! That was an exciting read. It was way too complex for my limited knowledge of computers. Sometime around 1993-1994, based on my placements against other relative events, I had the opportunity to "fix" a non-booting IBM Laptop. It was thick, heavy, and large but with just a screen the size of a 3½ Floppy. I have never encountered such a laptop in pictures or elsewhere, so I will assume it was even older in those…
Although the screen on that would have been somewhat larger than a 3.5" floppy (and it didn't even come with 3.5 floppies, just 5.25). You could find a smaller screen on the Osborne 1 and other early 80s portables, but they wouldn't have run DOS.
PC Convertible is another option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_Convertible
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A few years ago, I spent a fair share of time trying to copy files from and to a Macintosh Plus. I decided to use a 100 MB ZIP drive (actually two of them, SCSI for the Mac Plus and USB for a modern computer) and later a serial port connection with terminal software [1]. Now there's a much better and cheaper option: BlueSCSI [2]. It's a SCSI HDD emulator that allows to mount .img files stored on a SD card as HDD disk…
> 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 feel like this could be trivially solved by plugging an LLM to the OCR output with the sole task to correct spelling errors like that. That's pretty much one of the tasks LLMs should excell the most at.
Didn't it have 3.5" floppy disk?