A (lossy) fix for the bad OCR giving glitched PCM data would be to do a median sliding window filter. Not 100% accurate, but it would probably be good enough...
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
211–220 of 272 posts
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#212there is a screen and speaker :) mobiles have mic and cam.. and we can write a C or any oldschool that can transfer data to screen or speaker :) noisy ! no need to physically serial floppy disk things
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#213> The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. Adapting it didn't seem straightforward[...]
I suppose the author hasn't heard of eBay. The adapter is $15.
> The laptop has an AppleTalk port and a phone jack... but no networking software installed.
The author may have some search engine problems if they can't figure out that Macs have had networking software built in for ages, and that a PowerBook is too new to run any Mac OS that doesn't have networking :P
Transferring data via FAX is cool and job well done, but the other things really don't fit with a clever solution.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#214> 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…
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.
Two potential problems. I have tried serial transfers on a similar vintage of Mac, and it seems to require a USB/Serial adapter that supports proper RS-232 logic levels. Many (perhaps most) don't. I ended up using the built-in serial port on an older PC. The second issue is that you require software on the Mac side to perform the data transfer. Something like the rather common ClarisWorks would do the job, but the presence of Word and PowerPoint suggests they didn't have ClarisWorks. (Even if it did have ClarisWorks, they would need to know that ClarisWorks includes built-in communications software. It isn't exactly a common component in office suites.)
I suppose they could have explored AppleTalk, print drivers, or (depending on the version of MacOS) TCP/IP. Each option is limited though. AppleTalk requires another suitably equipped Mac or a PC with rare hardware and ancient software. (I think Sun systems would work too, but then we are really getting into the weeds.) I'm pretty sure the Mac print drivers rasterize the text, so you would still have to undo that. (Though it would probably transfer the data faster.) I think TCP/IP only shipped with MacOS 7.5 and later, would have required setup on another PC, and would still be convoluted (e.g. downloading FTP software to the Mac, so it could upload to a PC).
It's going to be a tricky situation.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#215Like others have said, AppleTalk is the right way to solve this.
But if we’re going with crazy hacks, I bet one could emulate an ADB keyboard to copy binaries onto the laptop by sending keystrokes to “type” hex into ResEdit.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#216I'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 li…
Just out of curiosity, would that old Mac OS have had OCR A or OCR B fonts available? (pretty sure Windows would have). These were essentially designed for OCR (duh...)
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#217Arn'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...
That's the first thing that came to my mind. I remember connecting two laptops using LPT or COM cable and transferring files using norton commander (if I remember correctly) 30 years ago.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#218I 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…
Did you try seeing how well ChatGPT was at OCRing the images? Though since it is HEX characters it might not do so good. I've found it to be very reliable at OCRin e.g. photos of receipts.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#219I would have compressed it with some kind of Reed-Solomon (ARC, RAR,...) and sent this hexdump instead per fax. Much shorter (audio is extremely compressable) and with additional OCR hints in the RS decoder. Even a trivial CRC check per block or line would be better than nothing
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#220Brings back a memory of doing a similar transfer with two systems that refused to communicate with each other. Had to install a printer driver long ago. The computer wasn't on the network and refused all media including connecting another hard drive directly. It did have a 300 baud modem though. Took an entire weekend to bounce the 11 something megabyte driver over to it through a BBS I emailed the driver to.