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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

#231

Post by Nevolihs »

StillBored wrote: post #128

Appletalk 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…

I wish the author had given the model of the HDD and pictures of the PCB and connector. I think it'll probably be reasonably simple to hook that up somewhere else to copy the data. I work at a place where we do this sort of thing all the time, even with 30 year old hardware or older, the problem is just getting out of the software solution box. This isn't a software problem and it requires a different sort of expertise for the most part.

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

#232

Post by coolcoder613 »

btbuildem wrote: post #46

My first thought was to use the serial port, but perhaps that was unavailable on the recipient hardware? The second, much more entertaining approach, would've been to harken back to the very arcane days of ZX Spectrums and C64s with tape drives... since the old laptop had functional speakers, it may have been possible to write a bit of code that endcoded the binary data to an audio stream, played that over the speake…

This "binary data" already is audio. The author did not want to do that because of the loss of fidelity.

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

#233

Post by Rinzler89 »

Sesse__ wrote: post #223
Rinzler89 wrote: post #166

Earlier 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.

AFAIK MacOS was just another UNIX, and in UXIX writing to a serial port was just writing to a file. Are you telling me MacOS had no shell scripting capabilities to write to a file via the command line? Even MS-DOS could do that.

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

#235

Post by lmz »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #233
Sesse__ wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AFAIK MacOS was just another UNIX, and in UXIX writing to a serial port was just writing to a file. Are you telling me MacOS had no shell scripting capabilities to write to a file via the command line? Even MS-DOS could do that.

Mac OS X is a UNIX (of sorts). Mac OS classic (as in the article) is most definitely not.

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

#236

Post by Rinzler89 »

lmz wrote: post #235
Rinzler89 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK MacOS was just another UNIX, and in UXIX writing to a serial port was just writing to a file. Are you telling me MacOS had no shell scripting capabilities to write to a file via the command line? Even MS-DOS could do that.

Mac OS X is a UNIX (of sorts). Mac OS classic (as in the article) is most definitely not.

So that version of MAcOS had no possibility of some command line shell scripting?

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

#238

Post by tfvlrue »

steve1977 wrote: post #216
tfvlrue wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

Nope, not that I found. The set of fonts installed was _very_ limited. I can't remember the exact count, but I think it was less than 20. Nothing specialized like an OCR font.

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

#239

Post by Sesse__ »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #236
lmz wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac OS X is a UNIX (of sorts). Mac OS classic (as in the article) is most definitely not.

So that version of MAcOS had no possibility of some command line shell scripting?

There was no command line at all.

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

#240

Post by semi »

endgame wrote: post #55

The fax is a good trick, but my favourite story of this type involves a hand-written hex editor and many, many, hours of copying bytes by hand: http://www.oocities.org/zztexpert/docs/upoprgv4.html

interesting story but i really wonder why he wrote it out with pencil and paper rather than directly typing it into the other computer.
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