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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

#201

Post by kalleboo »

Agingcoder wrote: post #117
t0mek wrote: post #49

A few years ago, I spent a fair share of time trying to copy files from and to a Macintosh Plus. I decided to use a 100 MB ZIP drive (actually two of them, SCSI for the Mac Plus and USB for a modern computer) and later a serial port connection with terminal software [1]. Now there's a much better and cheaper option: BlueSCSI [2]. It's a SCSI HDD emulator that allows to mount .img files stored on a SD card as HDD disk…

I dreamt of Zip drives back in the days - I never quite understood white they didn’t become standard, much like usb drives would become later.

They were proprietary and made by only one company. So there was a bit of a battle between Zip, SyQuest and LS120 ("SuperDisk")

What I don't get is why Magneto-Optical didn't take off. 3.5" disks that were essentially MiniDisc but not proprietary (there were drives and disks from several manufacturers), faster than Zip, and eventually got upgraded to over 1 GB capacity disks. They were huge in Japan where they became a de-facto standard, but mostly unheard of in the rest of the world.

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

#202

Post by twelvechairs »

musicale wrote: post #200

I like the idea of using a SCSI adapter or cable and then making a hard drive image, which can then be booted in an emulator or mounted in Linux (or NetBSD, or older MacOS?) using the hfs filesystem. Could also use hfstools. Making a localtalk adapter is also a cool idea. There seem to be localtalk implementations (tashtalk) for PIC microcontrollers. Someone even made a localtalk-wifi gateway.

Yeah. A quick google says this uses a HDI30 plug, you can get a converter from this to scsi plug cheaply and another from scsi to usb. Then you just mount it in Linux. I'd imagine that's by far the easiest and most complete route.

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

#203

Post by remram »

romwell wrote: post #190
lisper wrote: post #73

Earlier 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. Serial-to-USB adapters are easy to find. With the file sizes involved, one could take a picture of the screen showing the hex dump with a smartphone, and then OCR that . No need to even bother with external hardware.

Given that the perfect image from the fax barely worked, a photograph would certainly not do.

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

#204

Post by remram »

Symbiote wrote: post #44
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…

Did you try a search-and-replace in Word, changing the problem characters to something else? e.g. 0123456789ABCDEF 012345M7XPAVKHEF

That's brilliant! You could even expand each input character to multiple characters to build an error correcting code.

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

#205

Post by zamfi »

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…

One could also find-and-replace in Word to pick a set of 16 characters that avoids OCR confusion…

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

#206

Post by tfvlrue »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #133

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…

Author here. I was also surprised by this.

I simplified the story a bit for brevity. I actually tried a bunch of different font styles, including a 47 page fax using a pretty large size Courier (with only 72 characters per line). The screenshots from the blog post were after the point I decided OCR wasn't working, so I was using a heavily reduced font size to optimize the transfer time. Hence the characters looked like barely-legible blobs.

The Fax-to-Binary converter isn't doing anything particularly complicated with the image, just breaking it up into an accurately-aligned grid and hashing the pixel data of each tile.

Replacing the characters in the document hadn't occurred to me at the time! It's a good idea, but for my programmer brain, writing this software was the easier (and more fun) solution :)

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

#207

Post by ssl-3 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #189
jtriangle wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 har…

I'm a software guy and my first reaction was the same: "Two words: eBay, Linux" . But then it turns out: taking the harddrive out of that Powerbook Duo 280c is kinda sorta a real mess for it requires taking the entire laptop apart (I just looked at an online teardown video of that old Mac laptop). Now the advantage of eBay+Linux is that it works even if the screen is broken, if the laptop doesn't boot, etc. It works…

There's no reason to open the laptop to access the disk from another computer.

With a dock, that laptop gains an external SCSI port.

And with an external SCSI port, it can boot up in a mode wherein the whole laptop behaves like a standalone SCSI disk -- ready to use with whatever other computer with SCSI from the past 40-ish years that one can muster up.

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

#208

Post by ssl-3 »

elaus wrote: post #25
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 :)

Used cables exist on platforms like eBay.

(They can also be resold on eBay after they're done being used.)

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

#209

Post by hypercube33 »

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?

A laptop of this age should have a serial port. It's possible even with something like Win95 to run a null modem and tcp/IP over that and SMB to copy files to a semi modern OS.

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

#210

Post by tfvlrue »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #3

Well, the source site seems to be hosted on an 30-year-old laptop, and therefore unavailable (even trough archive.org), but here we go: -If you ever encounter a situation where "well, this volume might contain valuable data" is a thing, try to make a forensically-sound copy first; -Depending on the exact source media, this might be a very specific process. Don't skip on it, though. But, once you have an accurate copy…

> the source site seems to be hosted on an 30-year-old laptop

You're not too far off :)

It's actually hosted on super cheap shared VPS with only 768MB of RAM and a single CPU core. This is the first time it's seen any real heavy traffic, and all considered I think it did pretty well with such limited resources.

I did a little postmortem investigation and, surprisingly, it wasn't CPU-bound. A low memory condition killed the database service a couple times. It looks like PHP-FPM was set to scale too aggressively. For the future I've reduced the number of workers it can spawn. Server administration is not my specialty, so this was a fun learning experience!

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