This is a neat trick and all, but if you could find the Duo Dock, it has a SCSI port on it to connect a second hard drive.
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
141–150 of 272 posts
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
From the screenshot after the picture of the battery and a picture of a circuit diagram, we can see that the fax software is from Global Village ("GlobalFax PowerPort/Mercury Duo", probably v2.5)
GlobalFax had a terminal emulator app included, most likely ZTerm, in this case.
from https://tagn.wordpress.com/2023/09/10/tech-support-at-the-vi...:
" the absolute garbage terminal emulator software we were including in the box.
And I set about pestering Rick to get somebody to Dave Alverson’s ZTerm terminal emulator app bundled with our modems because it was light and easy and supported the ZModem file transfer protocol which "
So the user could have likely run ZTerm to transfer the files.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#143What 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.
I was thinking the same thing. A camera capture would be fast and accurate if you were going to ocr.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming environments were available of course, but none were built-in. The fact that the external floppy doesn't work is the main problem here. I think a better solution would have been to use the serial port rather than the modem port to send a fax. Serial-to-USB adapters are easy to find.
>I think a better solution would have been to use the serial port rather than the modem port to send a fax. From what I could Google, that laptop doesn't have a traditional RS-232 serial port but a DIN-8 RS-422 serial port. Still, it's serial, it's standard and very well documented, easy to acquire and easy to hook up. I'd definitely would have used that instead to transfer data, especially since I could find USB to…
I think if there was another "bridge" mac it would've been easier (setup LocalTalk over the serial port, could theoretically send the required TCP/IP libraries, to make it easier to go straight to a modern computer). I'd guess that the comment about "but no networking software installed." includes not having something like ZTerm installed already for direct serial communication, and also not having MacTCP or OpenTransport installed on the old mac (not to mention the missing hardware to set that up)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZTerm https://lowendmac.com/1998/tcpip-over-localtalk/
I have a few old macs that I play with from time to time, and it's certainly possible to network them to modern computers, just becoming increasingly hard with the number of old software and hardware items you have to keep around to do it.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#145Maybe I missed it, but it seems the actual sound file that was transferred wasn't included in the post... A shame, since all that buildup had me wondering what the file was!
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Did not know that. Indeed it's very useful. Thank you!
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I think a better solution would have been to use the serial port rather than the modem port to send a fax. From what I could Google, that laptop doesn't have a traditional RS-232 serial port but a DIN-8 RS-422 serial port. Still, it's serial, it's standard and very well documented, easy to acquire and easy to hook up. I'd definitely would have used that instead to transfer data, especially since I could find USB to…
I think if there was another "bridge" mac it would've been easier (setup LocalTalk over the serial port, could theoretically send the required TCP/IP libraries, to make it easier to go straight to a modern computer). I'd guess that the comment about "but no networking software installed." includes not having something like ZTerm installed already for direct serial communication, and also not having MacTCP or OpenTran…
>I think if there was another "bridge" mac it would've been easier (setup LocalTalk over the serial port
But serial communication doesn't require another Mac to receive the data since it's just raw HEX/ASCII bytes over the standard serial protocol. You can pick up the data with an Arduino.
Nor does serial mandate any handshake or a master-slave sync to work. You're free to shoot those bytes on the empty wire for all it cares. If someone picks them up good, if not, just as good.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#148Earlier 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.
From the screenshot after the picture of the battery and a picture of a circuit diagram, we can see that the fax software is from Global Village ("GlobalFax PowerPort/Mercury Duo", probably v2.5) GlobalFax had a terminal emulator app included, most likely ZTerm, in this case. from https://tagn.wordpress.com/2023/09/10/tech-support-at-the-vi... : " the absolute garbage terminal emulator software we were including in t…
Excellent find!
The user should have consulted HN before diving into the problem. :)
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#149How do you transfer files off an Apple laptop from 1994? It's harder than it sounds!
Somewhat misleading. It would have been trivial if the laptop didn't have multiple hardware faults.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#150How do you transfer files off an Apple laptop from 1994? It's harder than it sounds! Somewhat misleading. It would have been trivial if the laptop didn't have multiple hardware faults.
To be expected from a 30 year old laptop no?