How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by ruslan » Fri, May 31, 2024, 4:07 PM UTC

chasil wrote: post #16

In my younger years, I had to pull a dBase 2 database off a CP/M desktop into an MS-DOS portable. I ended up configuring a serial cable, and running PROCOMM on the PC, set 9600/n/8/1 on both ports, then printed from dBase 2 and set PROCOMM to record the session to a file. It would lose characters if I let it run too long without a pause to write to a floppy, so I would ctrl-s/q on the CP/M side. I guess nobody else h…

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.

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

#22

Post by qiqitori » Fri, May 31, 2024, 4:07 PM UTC

> 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 problem by writing a tool to help verify the OCR result. Basically you input the OCR'd result and segment the numbers. It'll display the original segmented characters ordered by their class, and the human eye will very quickly find any chars that do not belong, e.g. 3s sorted under "8" etc.

https://blog.qiqitori.com/2023/03/ocring-hex-dumps-or-other-...

https://blog.qiqitori.com/2023/03/ai-day-in-retroland-prolog...

I wrote two blog posts about this, and the tools are also linked from the blog posts. Note: the tools are just slightly more user-friendly than sendmail.

That said, I don't know if these old Apple laptops came with anything resembling a programming environment (or at least that ancient version of Microsoft Word?), but even if not... There must be a better way (even without hardware hacking)!

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

#23

Post by tfvlrue » Fri, May 31, 2024, 4:08 PM UTC

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?

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.

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

#24

Post by theideaofcoffee » Fri, May 31, 2024, 4:08 PM UTC

He says that there are internal speakers, but no jack. If it were me, I would have cracked the case open and tapped into the audio going to the speakers directly and recorded it from another device, but then again this makes a much more satisfying hack.

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

#25

Post by elaus » Fri, May 31, 2024, 4:09 PM UTC

gist wrote: post #15

Very creative and interesting ie 'use whatever tools/knowledge you have' but: > The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. This is literally never an issue as old connectors are easily obtainable (in particular 'in this day and age'). > Adapting it didn't seem straightforward, and we weren't confident the old file system (HFS) would be easy to read from a modern system. Simple search pulled this up.…

I sympathize with the notion to fix things in software instead of buying hardware (an SCSI adapter): You have to spend money, wait for it to arrive (or even leave the house to get it yourself!) and it's one more future plastic waste.

If fiddling around and getting creative is something one enjoys (and has the time to do so), doing things like OP did is a nice alternative :)

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

#26

Post by wannacboatmovie » Fri, May 31, 2024, 4:09 PM UTC

If it had "fax software" it almost certainly had terminal emulator software whereby one could use something like ZMODEM and not corrupting the files in the process.

This was painful to read, like using a butter knife as a precision screwdriver.

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

#27

Post by WalterBright » Fri, May 31, 2024, 4:10 PM UTC

In the olden days, we transferred files using the RS232 serial port between computers that had no compatible media.

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

#28

Post by josephcsible » Fri, May 31, 2024, 4:10 PM UTC

> Oops. The FCC says I need a cover page. Let's try to appease them.

Yet another reason I hate when things I own try to enforce laws against me: there will be cases, like the author's, in which the law doesn't apply but the thing doesn't know it.

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

#29

Post by rvense » Fri, May 31, 2024, 4:11 PM UTC

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...

Apple used 8-pin mini DIN connectors for serial. The author might not have had the right cable.

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

#30

Post by chem83 » Fri, May 31, 2024, 4:11 PM UTC

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.

Also, replace the ambiguous characters like D/0 or 3/8 to something a bit more recognizable like D becomes d and 8 becomes X and then do a find-replace after the OCR process. Was there really a need to write the OCR software from scratch?