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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

#161

Post by adrianmonk »

kelnos wrote: post #130
StillBored wrote: post #128

Appletalk 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…

I assume they must have meant it doesn't have any TCP/IP networking software installed. As I recall, Macs had AppleTalk hardware from the very beginning and AppleTalk software was a built-in part of Mac OS. I don't know if it's even possible to remove if you tried.

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

oneplane wrote: post #39
ruslan wrote: post #12

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...

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…

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by EvanAnderson »

oneplane wrote: post #39
ruslan wrote: post #12

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...

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…

> Alternatively, you can use the serial port to 'print' to, and just capture the serial output.

I've done this to recover data from a number of old systems. It's a great way to get at old data.

I've also done this to get data out of proprietary databases. As long as there's a report that gets the data you want it becomes just a parsing problem.

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

#164

Post by brisketbbq »

I think I would have just pulled out my audio recorder and played the file on the computer.

The files were very small and recorded with the internal mic on the computer, so it's not as though these are high quality recordings, they're more sentimental to whoever owned the laptop.

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

#165

Post by olyjohn »

tsegers wrote: post #69
thebeardisred wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just had to update the firmware my HF radio using xmodem protocol. Tons of modern ham radio gear still using serial data... even the modern ones that connect to your PC via USB, still just a USB->serial device built in.

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

#166

Post by Rinzler89 »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #153
Rinzler89 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Sure, but IDK how you'd send them on a mac without the software to do it? Is there even an environment you can program in? Can Applescript on classic macos do serial stuff in any form?

IDK about MacOS, but on Windows 9x/XP, sending bytes via serial was incredibly trivial in C#, Visual C++ or even ols school Visual Basic.[1]

Even if you didn't have one of the dozens of already written serial terminal apps, you could write your own pretty easily in one of those languages to push bytes out the serial port, with just a few standard API calls.

I doubt MacOS didn't have something similar. Unless of course, MacOS back then was somehow shittier than Windows, which I doubt.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.visua...

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

#167

Post by mminer237 »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #119
qiqitori wrote: post #22

> 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…

It's hexadecimal. There is no spelling, so there's no way for an LLM to know if something is supposed to be a `D` or a `0` any more than traditional OCR software can.

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

#168

Post by asveikau »

I wonder how hard it would be to track down a dock. Googling around, it seems like the dock has nubus slots, which would mean you could add ethernet.

From there, I remember running ssh and scp on classic macs, so that is theoretically possible. Getting those old clients to talk with modern sshd might be tough.

I feel like I would attempt that, or perhaps floppies, before what this person did...

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

#170

Post by ruslan »

meffie wrote: post #139
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?

Knowing about Fidonet is too much. But a little bit of UUCP definitely won't hurt. ;)
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