Hum, a 30-years-old laptop without a serial port? Because a usb-serial on a modern machine, a null-modem cable, kermit/gtkterm/minicom/* and passing data it's much easier...
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
241–250 of 272 posts
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if you could convince the mac there was was a postscript printer on the other end, then retrieve the text from the ps commands that were sent.
You could use local talk and another Mac with ethernet or a floppy drive. Mac file sharing is built in with system 7 and later
https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Serial_port links to "Macintosh Serial Throughput" (1998)
https://lowendmac.com/1998/macintosh-serial-throughput/ which mentions a Farallon Mac serial to Ethernet adapter.
/? farallon Mac serial port Ethernet https://www.google.com/search?q=farallon+mac+serial+port+eth... : $50 and no FreePPP or Zmodem or AppleScript serial port to a [soldered] cable to an Arduino/RP2040W/ESP32 (which is probably faster than the old Mac).
https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/548343/44804 mentions minicom and gnu screen, and the need to implement e.g. file-level checksums because over serial like ROM flashing
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#243Earlier 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.
Everything from DOS 5.x onwards (including Windows 9x and NT) came with QBasic, previous versions of DOS had GW-BASIC.
Not the greatest tools out of the box, but still better than nothing.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the screenshot after the picture of the battery and a picture of a circuit diagram, we can see that the fax software is from Global Village ("GlobalFax PowerPort/Mercury Duo", probably v2.5) GlobalFax had a terminal emulator app included, most likely ZTerm, in this case. from https://tagn.wordpress.com/2023/09/10/tech-support-at-the-vi... : " the absolute garbage terminal emulator software we were including in t…
Awesome sleuthing! Should we discover any more files to recover from the laptop, I may explore this avenue a bit further. If the ZTerm software is present, the trickiest part might be physically connecting the serial port to something else. Not an insurmountable problem.
I think that'd be cool. The physical connection might be easy enough, if the serial speed is set low-ish you can get by with just some wires: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/powerbook-100-180-se...
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#245Earlier 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…
Denoising algorithms are always lossy. An LLM (or, y'know, Markov chain) could do this job by exploiting statistical regularities in the English language, but a hex dump isn't quite the English language, so it'd be completely useless. Even if this text were English, though, the LLM would make opinionated edits (e.g. twiddling the punctuation): you'd be unlikely to get a faithful reproduction out the other end.
Of course, use search and replace to change 0 to zero... etc.
The OCR will (should) work better.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#246> 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 t…
Started typing almost exactly this comment before checking to see if anyone else had. Absolutely. I guarantee that for any "old hardware" need there's a geek expert selling recovery/compatibility/adaptation hardware. These problems have all been solved, albeit not at a level of "take it into a repair shop" convenience.
Just as a point of general archival best practices: old spinning media are extremely fragile. Your goal should be to image the drive exactly once, before doing anything else. Once that completes, everything amounts to a pure software problem you can solve at your convenience. But insisting on booting that drive repeatedly trying to "recover" it is a good way to break it forever.
Also:
> The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. 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.
Yeah, that's silly. You can literally mount that drive image on a vanilla linux box.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#247Would opening the laptop and attaching an audio jack the speaker wires have worked?
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#248"Think Alert Sound" I see in the dialog box -- is that the "I'm trying to think but nothing happens!" error message alert sound popular on Macs of that era? (We had that sound in the office, and many more.)
The sound I recall is the last phrase in 3stooges05.mp3 from here:
https://www.barbneal.com/the-collection/tv-shows/the-three-s...
Everyone's talking about the way to connect to the Mac, I'm just wondering if it's easier get the sound sources the Mac sounds the person wants were made from.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#249>The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. Adapting it didn't seem straightforward
this was the way:
SCSI is a bus mastering protocol which allows multiple masters to share the bus, which means you can plug two computers into the same SCSI bus at the same time and they will both be able to share access the disk device. You wouldn't want to rely on simultaneous access to the file system, but the entire disk from those days would be just a large file today and you could just dump the whole thing (the inconsistencies in the open file system would be like recovering from a crash, and none of the long term files would be affected)
> and we weren't confident the old file system (HFS) would be easy to read from a modern system.
the nice thing about opensource/New Jersey style is that that old HFS would be completely easy to mount loopback on linux
I still have a complete disk image of my old Mac SE20 from 1988, and I still mount it up from time to time, and I pulled it off my old mac through the scsi bus. I believe the 20 referred to the MHz of the 68020 processor, but it also coincidentally had a 20MB disk, as was the case for the SE30 that came out the following year.
> Deus fax machina: While the laptop has no networking software, it does have fax software ... The first question was how to turn the audio file into something faxable.
this reminds me of an old idea I had that I never pursued. Back in the days of fax there was generally a cover sheet for tracking/delivery of faxes in an office environment, but which seemed like a waste of paper/modem time to me who was never in a big org situation. To cut to the chase for my idea, I thought it would be cool to transmit something like a large QR code on the coversheet, which would be an encoding of the document you were sending in .DOC (ms-word) format. That way, you could fax to a fax machine, but if the recipient was a computer modem it could receive the document in original format, and abort (via handshake) the rest of the fax transmission. I thought it would be a gentle way to transition past "obsolete" fax technology.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#250Would opening the laptop and attaching an audio jack the speaker wires have worked?
Yes, but a lossy copy.