> we weren't confident the old file system (HFS) would be easy to read from a modern system.
AFAIK modern Linux is still able to properly read from HFS and HFS+. I mounted a MacOS 9 disk image just a few days ago.
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
171–180 of 272 posts
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#172Appletalk 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…
Appletalk was installed by default in all Macs of that era - the author is talking about TCP/IP
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Still would not solve the problem of copying data without changing it.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#174Those games brought back some memories…. Escape Velocity was such an awesome game!
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Awesome sleuthing! Should we discover any more files to recover from the laptop, I may explore this avenue a bit further. If the ZTerm software is present, the trickiest part might be physically connecting the serial port to something else. Not an insurmountable problem.
As a poor Atari owner out in the nowere, I used metal paper-clips bent into shape and welded cables on them to connect my weird non-standard ports to other things. Worked pretty good :-)
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#176This feels like a practical exam in information theory, and I love it. "You've got a 32,000 byte file to transmit over a channel of your choice. They all suck in some way. You have a smartphone, a serial port, and a computer. The computer has no compiler, but you can use any of its native facilities. Solutions that require more bytes of input (eg scripts) than are in the file to be transferred are disqualified. There…
OCR from smartphone camera could easily make mistakes that would be difficult to detect and correct.
What I would do is look for some kind of encoding that makes errors extremely unlikely. If I had to dump the entire laptop's drive, I'd rather leave the laptop running for a week once than use a faster method that introduces errors.
I don't know much about error correction, so let's take naive approach. 320MB (drive size) in a week is 530 bytes per second. I don't know what's the screen refresh rate (and reaction time) but it's sensible to assume that if we display any image at 4Hz and record it with a smartphone, we won't miss frames or have any other funny artifacts. So it's like 135 bytes per frame, which is 1080 bits. If we divide the 8.4 inch 640x480 screen into squares 16 by 16 pixels, then we have 1000 squares 0.5 by 0.5cm. If each square is either black or white for 0.25 seconds, then camera artifacts shouldn't affect the transferred data too much, and the bandwidth is almost exactly what we need.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#177This feels like a practical exam in information theory, and I love it. "You've got a 32,000 byte file to transmit over a channel of your choice. They all suck in some way. You have a smartphone, a serial port, and a computer. The computer has no compiler, but you can use any of its native facilities. Solutions that require more bytes of input (eg scripts) than are in the file to be transferred are disqualified. There…
with a hex editor, I wonder how many bytes it would take to input a binary program that output the data to the screen as a series of black and white images, like a QR code but not. So you wouldn't be trying to OCR characters which has the problems mentioned, but you'd have to get the program into it first.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cours…
No need for any programming language in Windows 9X, just open a DOS prompt and use 'copy file.txt COM1: /B'. We used that trick back in the DOS days to print raw ASCII files on parallel (LPT1:) or serial (COM1:) devices. I'm willing to bet it still works on Win11.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I wonder if you could convince the mac there was was a postscript printer on the other end, then retrieve the text from the ps commands that were sent.
You could use local talk and another Mac with ethernet or a floppy drive. Mac file sharing is built in with system 7 and later
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#180This feels like a practical exam in information theory, and I love it. "You've got a 32,000 byte file to transmit over a channel of your choice. They all suck in some way. You have a smartphone, a serial port, and a computer. The computer has no compiler, but you can use any of its native facilities. Solutions that require more bytes of input (eg scripts) than are in the file to be transferred are disqualified. There…
Before I ever entertained any sort of soft solution, I would have the drive out and plugged into a XYZ to USB interface. Simple manner of installing hfsprogs mounting the drive, yanking the files you want off, and you're done.
The proprietary connector might prove to be a problem, would likely have to bodge your way to victory there, but, mercifully, old stuff tends to work when bodged just fine.
Perks of being a hardware guy first to be honest.