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How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

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Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#131

Post by kelnos »

adastra22 wrote: post #52
tfvlrue wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Seeing how difficult it was to get a reliable OCR transcription with commercial software from a pristine, computer-generated representation of the text, I suspect trying to OCR photos would be even less reliable :) I simplified some things for brevity in the write-up. I did indeed try a bunch of fonts/font sizes (trying a single page at a time and manually inspecting the results) without much improvement…

Why not display the info as a series of QR images? There probably wasn’t a dev environment on the laptop though. For the record, you’d have had no problem mounting an image of the HFS disk on any modern Linux or macOS system.

Well, mounting the disk itself. If it was simple to get an image of the disk, the author could have used the same method to just get the files they wanted.

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#132

Post by kelnos »

kleiba wrote: post #7

If you have OCR in the loop anyway, you could have just taken a picture of the file as displayed on the original laptop, no need to do the fax transfer.

Right. Fax is a terrible, crappy protocol that generates pretty bad images on the receiving side, even when you have clean phone lines. I wouldn't be surprised if a modern camera-phone photo of the screen displaying the text would yield a better image.

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#133

Post by PhasmaFelis »

I'm slightly shocked that (all?) modern OCR systems can't handle a perfectly clean image of Courier text with 100% reliability.

I wonder if reducing the font size for faster transmission made it worse? A larger font might have been easier to read. Probably save time in the long run.

EDIT: Actually, looking at the output of the Fax to Binary Converter program, I think that's very likely. Even I'm not 100% sure whether that 8x6 glob of pixels is a 0 or a D.

Hmmm. If nothing else, what about search-and-replacing the Word doc to replace some of the most difficult characters with clearer ones, and then reversing the process on the other end? I mean, that's ridiculously complex, but not as complex as writing a custom Fax to Binary Converter app.

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#134

Post by jdthedisciple »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #125
jdthedisciple wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> hex dump

ah, missed that, was just skipping through

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#135

Post by adastra22 »

kelnos wrote: post #131
adastra22 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not display the info as a series of QR images? There probably wasn’t a dev environment on the laptop though. For the record, you’d have had no problem mounting an image of the HFS disk on any modern Linux or macOS system.

Well, mounting the disk itself. If it was simple to get an image of the disk, the author could have used the same method to just get the files they wanted.

There are many different SCSI to USB cables out there, for exactly this purpose. Even the weird mini-SCSI interface used by Apple in the 90’s.

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#136

Post by morsch »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #108

I keep an old USB-to-SCSI adapter cable handy for this sort of challenge. In general, I hoard any USB-to-X adapters that I come across (RS232, parallel printer port, USB floppy drive, USB optical drive). Of course if you don't have the right SCSI cable that may not be worth the effort in this case.

Which SCSI? There's like five for just old school parallel SCSI.

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#137

Post by gizajob »

What about pointing a camera at the screen and then paging through all the numbers on the Mac while capturing images?? Then you could OCR the numbers directly on the capturing laptop rather than trying to convert sound back into text.

10/10 for ingenuity anyway using the fax port.

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#138

Post by gizajob »

mbreese wrote: post #2

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?

I had this brainwave and basically duped your comment before I’d scrolled down to read it…

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#139

Post by meffie »

mrunkel wrote: post #20

DB9 serial to USB Null modem cable + some simple file transfer software would have solved this in minutes. Since the mac had a built-in modem, you could have used that software to transfer the file via xmodem or ymodem protocol. I guess this isn't common knowledge any more.

Should we tell them about fidonet too?

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#140

Post by ale42 »

ruslan wrote: post #101
tsegers wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

U-Boot supports Zmodem ?

EDIT: actually not ZModem, but it supports X/YModem -- source code, despite the comment at its beginning, finally says "Sorry, zModem not available yet"

yes and also X/Ymodem, see source code: https://elixir.bootlin.com/u-boot/latest/source/common/xyzMo...

extremely useful feature (I used xmodem in the past, if I remember well)

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