I'd have got the floppy working. It's highly likely a short, perhaps a bent pin, if it's failing to start with it connected, or possibly just some duff caps.
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
221–230 of 272 posts
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Or they’d do with a similar accuracy, since the main factor here is font rendering resolution.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#223Earlier 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…
Windows 9x/XP did not come with C#, Visual C++ or Visual Basic. Likewise, classic macOS did not come with any programming or scripting languages. In this respect, they were equally “shitty”, and your solution would have been unavailable for both.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#224> 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…
Good idea. Maybe making the replacements short, space-separated words would have helped even more, by countering any "helpful corrections" the OCR might have been making based on English words (e.g., it would not surprise me if some OCR software would "correct" "B0B" to "BOB").
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#225Those artifacts in the audio file should be trivial to correct, I suspect even a super simple outlier detection script would have worked. Should have been much easier than optimising the OCR (not to disparage the effort).
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Windows 9x/XP did not come with C#, Visual C++ or Visual Basic. Likewise, classic macOS did not come with any programming or scripting languages. In this respect, they were equally “shitty”, and your solution would have been unavailable for both.
windows xp sp1 and later bundled .net framework, which included compilers for c# and vb.net.
ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework_version_history...
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#227Well, 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 kill…
Wow! That’s efficiency right there. I’m pretty sure you can get a device with those specs for Good job.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#228I keep an old USB-to-SCSI adapter cable handy for this sort of challenge. In general, I hoard any USB-to-X adapters that I come across (RS232, parallel printer port, USB floppy drive, USB optical drive). Of course if you don't have the right SCSI cable that may not be worth the effort in this case.
Hold onto it, these things are incredibly rare.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#229Faxing a hexdump then OCRing it,.instead of sending the file itself by Xmodem/Zmodem?
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
yes i noticed that way too late, my bad