raspberry pi with serial and localtalk. done.
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
121–130 of 272 posts
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#122Upon reading the headline, my guess for how to copy a file off would involve a Parallel-port ZIP drive on the old computer, then using a USB ZIP drive on the modern computer. Or a USB disk enclosure that uses IDE. Now I'll go read the article...
Oh, it's about a Mac...
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#123If it was an old DOS/Windows laptop, you could just use INTERLNK via COM or parallel port. I have to post that, it's just such a nostalgic memory copying files like that.
So if somebody needs to do it: Dosbox + USB-RS232 adapter and the right cable. INTERLNK/SRV was included with DOS 6.0 and later, so it's rather easy to find.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think in this particular (macbook) case the problem was lack of proper software. Yet, I recall if there was modem installed, a terminal software had to be present as well.
Is it so hard to write your own program which would just read a file stream and send it to a port? Maybe also split it into smaller frames with CRC hashes attached.
CP/M was an OS for the 8080/Z80, which was limited to 64k of RAM.
None of the tools that you know today would work in something that small.
There was a C compiler for a dialect of C that met these constraints; I didn't have it, and I didn't know C at the time.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#125> 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 feel like this could be trivially solved by plugging an LLM to the OCR output with th…
Denoising algorithms are always lossy. An LLM (or, y'know, Markov chain) could do this job by exploiting statistical regularities in the English language, but a hex dump isn't quite the English language, so it'd be completely useless. Even if this text were English, though, the LLM would make opinionated edits (e.g. twiddling the punctuation): you'd be unlikely to get a faithful reproduction out the other end.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#126> The laptop has no audio jacks, so we couldn't get good analog copies of the recordings even if we wanted to.
How about directly connecting a DSO to the speaker terminals?
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#127One of the coolest articles I’ve read lately. Thanks for sharing!
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#128Appletalk is the way to go, the drivers are built in and apple did a good job of maintaining compatibility over a long timeframe. I have similar issues moving stuff between a IIGS and modern machines. Its possible to move stuff with floppy emulators, via scsi , or just raw serial, but the simplicity of having a Mac with both appletalk and ethernet, allows one to drag and drop entire file hierarchies between the target appletalk based machine and a SMB/etc share from the machine in the middle.
Also SCSI tends to be easy to convert if one knows the drive connector/type, and is willing to chain a couple adapters. I'm sure that is the case here too, the 2.5" scsi drives were a form of SCA connectors IIRC, SCSI adapters exist for almost anything to anything as long as the single ended vs differential rules are followed, newer ultra differential adapters could usually fall back to 8 bit single ended allowing them to drive just about everything. The problem is going to be finding an OS/etc that can real the old mac filesystems although I'm guessing one of the utilities to read raw images (of which i'm failing to remember the ones Ive used in the past) could probably read/write the raw disk image.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you try a search-and-replace in Word, changing the problem characters to something else? e.g. 0123456789ABCDEF 012345M7XPAVKHEF
Nope! That's a good idea though. The transcription errors I was getting were not consistent. Like, D would be O or 0 or D, with no apparent rhyme or reason to it. And the turnaround time on each fax attempt was long enough that I focused on doing the image recognition myself instead.
This was a phenomenal effort and such a joy to read. Based on how much work this was, these were probably some very important sound files that mean a lot to someone in your family, so thanks for your hard work getting them off the laptop.
My goofy idea was using the font OCR-A but you'd be very lucky if that Mac came with that.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#130Appletalk is the way to go, the drivers are built in and apple did a good job of maintaining compatibility over a long timeframe. I have similar issues moving stuff between a IIGS and modern machines. Its possible to move stuff with floppy emulators, via scsi , or just raw serial, but the simplicity of having a Mac with both appletalk and ethernet, allows one to drag and drop entire file hierarchies between the targe…
> Appletalk is the way to go, the drivers are built in
The article author claims the networking software wasn't installed, though.
> Also SCSI tends to be easy to convert if one knows the drive connector/type, and is willing to chain a couple adapters.
I was thinking this too. And the author also says they didn't believe they'd be able to read the HFS volume, but Linux has had an HFS driver for... decades?... at this point.